


Magical Detective Ayase Yue

by GrandHaberdasher



Category: Mahou Sensei Negima!
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-01-07 02:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 26,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1114365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrandHaberdasher/pseuds/GrandHaberdasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Armed with magic, wits, and a hard-boiled monologue, Yue solves crimes and gets in fights on the Mahora campus and beyond. Based on chapter 354.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which There is Hard-Boiled Exposition

**Author's Note:**

> Book One: The Case of the Missing Mech

The sky was the color of a digital television tuned to a dead channel, and the sun plodded across the sky with the joyless determination of someone beginning to realize that slow and steady won very few races in the real world. My office smelled of a mixture of ozone, desperation, and my orange-and-curry-flavored drinks. To a stranger, that might sound like an awful reek, but to me it was homey, like the nicotine odor of a hobbit-hole. Nevertheless, I was about to exit the fragrant premises at the behest of someone willing to pay good money for my discerning intellect and atrophied sense of self-preservation. My name's Ayase Yue. I'm a private eye.

Experience is a strict teacher, fond of throwing chalk. It had long since taught me that when life doesn't deviate from your plans, it means you're walking into an ambush or dancing on puppet strings. That said, I can usually get through "Step 1: Egress place of business" before the monkeys bring their wrenches. The fact that the wrench came in the form of a dame was rather less surprising.

"Hello? Detective? I'd like your help with something."

She had long, toned legs fit for an athlete or a dancer, displayed to perfection by her long boots and short skirt. She had big black eyes, pits you'd get lost in without a trace if you leaned in too close. She had hair the same color, an uncommon sight in Mahora, topped by even rarer cat ears. I knew her. Even with the little time I'd seen her, long years ago, I could recognize her. I may never have seen those lovely long limbs covered with that lovely black hair, or those caliginous eyes turn to gold, but our acquaintance had been...memorable enough.

"You're...Koyomi, right? Or you called yourself that when you worked with Fate." I noticed her tensing when I said his name, going from the same kind of nervous most folks have when they first walk into my office to bowstring tight for a moment. Either she hated him and hated to hear his name or she loved him still and hated me saying it. "I only have a few minutes before I need to get going, but if you let me know what you need my help with I can at least tell you if it's the sort of thing that I do."

"Me and a few others from Cosmo Entelechia are working on recreating the _Libri Sibyllini_. We came here because we heard your library has a fragment of it. As long as we were here, we thought we'd do a little sightseeing. It's a beautiful campus. As we were crossing a certain rooftop, we all started feeling sick and weak at once. The feeling went away after we'd walked a bit, and after we spent a little time checking things we figured out that we only felt weird when we were standing in one specific spot. It's marked on this map," she said, unfolding said item and handing it to me.

"Interesting," I said, tone and face and slouch all putting the lie to my word. "I'll check it out sometime after I deal with this case for the school. Oh, who else is with you? In case I need to ask you all for further details, you understand."

"Besides me, there's Bri- er, Shirabe is how you'd know her, Tamaki, Homura, and Cassandra. She's a naiad, and she was one of Master Fate's orphans but never a fighter." _Master_ Fate, huh? Guess it's love after all.

Now, I have not always risen to my full scholastic potential, but none have claimed that I am incapable of basic arithmetic since I was halfway through the first grade. I could tell that something didn't add up. The story itself I neither believed nor doubted just yet, obviously rehearsed though it was. My suspicions were aroused by something else entirely, and I figured my best shot at satisfying them would come from shaking my guest until something fell out.

"So Shiori or Luna or whatever she goes by now couldn't make it, huh? Guess she had better things to do than hang around a bunch of has-beens stuck in weak artificial bodies, huh?"

"Don't you talk about my friend like that." Her fists were clenched and her voice heated. It was a start.

"You know, ''Master'' Fate could probably sort out your little weirdness no problem if hadn't ditched you all years ago. That's rough, the way you got punished and he and Shiori didn't because they stabbed you in the back ten seconds before Negi won."

"Shut up! Master Fate and Shiori fought hard for us! That's the only reason we were allowed to walk free at all!" Her knuckles were white, her decibel levels had made a jump upwards, and she'd gone into that head forward, shoulders up stance some folks think makes them look tough. If she'd had a tail, she'd have been lashing it. Come to Mama.

"No kidding? Guess there's some honor among terrorists after all."

_"WE ARE NOT TERRORISTS! WE WERE FIGHTING TO SAVE THE WORLD WHILE YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS WERE WHINING ABOUT SCHOOLWORK, AND I WILL NO-"_

I cut her off with a thunderclap, courtesy of an unincanted spell I'm fond of. It's a mere parlor trick, without the force to rattle the glass on my desk, but it does get people's attention.

"Why did they send you, Koyomi?"

"What?"

"They sent you to ask an old enemy for help. Not Shirabe, the one Fate trusted to perform the ritual with Asuna. Not Tamaki, who never loses her cool. Not this Cassandra chick who never attacked me or my friends. You. What makes Miss Angry Kitty the best spokesman, huh?"

She took a moment to collect herself, chewing her lips and looking everywhere but me. Either she was a terrible liar trying to come up with a decent or a brilliant one trying to appear terrible. I figured the first, since if it was the second I might as well resign myself to bamboozlement. I let her get as far as " " before letting loose the thunderclap again.

"That's a lie and you know it!" I roared. "Now tell me the truth!"

"We know you like beastgirls!" Koyomi blurted.

"What."

It looked like all the blood in her body was having a get-together in her face, and she was toeing the ground like a kid getting lectured about breaking the expensive vase. "We, uh, heard about you and those girls from Ariadne, and we thought you'd be more likely to help us if it was me that asked you."

That was too inane and insulting to be taken as anything other than the absolute truth. I knew about those rumors. Between my close relationships with Colette and Emily and the minor celebrity I'd gained as part of Ala Alba, they were inevitable. I'd just never expected my old enemies to try to weaponize tabloid gossip. If Koyomi was lying right then, I would consider it an honor to be cozened by such a master. For a moment, I could only stare silently and marvel. "Look, I really do have a case I should have already left for, from someone who didn't start out with some clumsy manipulation and never attacked me or my friends." The second part of that is both absolutely true and a bald-faced lie, but I had no interest in getting into that with the catgirl right then. "Why don't you just step out of my office so I can lock up. I'll check out your weird hot spot later tonight, and if you drop by tomorrow, I'll either tell you that I can deal with it or direct you to someone who can. Or let you know that it was all nothing, or that it's a sign the Great Old Ones are going to eat us all, or whatever. Sound fair?"

She nodded and bolted. No wonder. That last revelation must have been about as pleasant to relate as it was to hear. I locked the locks both mundane and magical, and took off towards my patient contact with a fair turn of speed myself.


	2. In Which There is Magical Detecting

I alighted from my staff and sprinted the final stretch to the engineering building, so as to appear properly winded in my apologies. Nijūin Rina, the person who would actually be paying me, would forgive much, but the Robot Engineering Club members loitering about were a different story. I expected theater to be the better part of not having the road in front of my office mined. Granted, the traps would be nonlethal by the club's liberal standards, but having potential customers spending money on hospital bills rather than my fee would be very bad for business.

Rina was the daughter of another mage teacher, and the second-youngest teacher in Mahora history. She had a rather inflated opinion of me dating back to our first meeting, where I was able to identify her as an illusion specialist and explain how I would escape if she tried to trap me in one. For some reason, explaining that I had the advantage of her due to chronal shenanigans tied up with a thwarted plot to reveal magic to the blinkered masses failed to remove the stars from her eyes. Kids these days. So easily impressed.

In the meantime, I was her go-to gal for identifying the culprits in things like Mahora's intermittent inter-club warfare. The students usually stuck to things like shouted insults, thrown produce, and the occasional light brawl. This time, some enterprising soul had turned one of the walls of the Robot Engineering Club room into a brand-new entrance you could drive a decent-sized mech through.

Once my contrition was judged sufficient by those present, I took a quick nip from my hip flask. My specialty concoction provides an all-around enhancement to my sensory abilities and a pleasant strawberry-pepper aftertaste. The increased glare, din, and reek of the world at large that comes with the drink seemed a little less excruciating than I remembered. I idly wondered if I'd been using it enough to build up a resistance before focusing on the actual job I could get paid for. Turning my attention to the scattered debris, I found scrape marks. Some sort of tool or claw then, rather than just a spell or chi technique. The scrape marks yielded something that had never been wall to my probing brush, and a quick test confirmed that the particles were once part of something magical. That meant magical weapons or summoned monsters. That could be a couple of the occult clubs, most of the art clubs, the History Club, or the damn Strolling Club. It could always be the Strolling Club. They knew enough ninjutsu and old-school ninja philosophy that damn near anything could be the Strolling Club trying to shift the blame to someone else, and it was all Kaede's fault for teaching them. Just goes to show that anyone who won't open their eyes will be trouble.

"Got all I can from here," I told Rina and the passel of unsubtle eavesdroppers. "Lemme see what I can get from the room." I got quite a lot from the room, as it happened. Fingerprints, footprints, strands of hair and all manner of other Clues. Unfortunately, it all looked standard human, and if I had the resources to suss out what belonged to who and whether they should be there, I wouldn't need the money from this job. A shame my quarry hadn't been thoughtful enough to leave a signed note implicating themselves. It's hard to get a decent phantom thief these days. "Was there anything taken? It looks like there's still a bunch of widgets and full robots here, and nothing looks vandalized."

A girl who looked to be in the tail end of high school swept up to me from the crowd of loiterers. She wore cat-eye glasses, short green hair, and the expression of a queen condescending to speak to the royal rat-catcher. "I am the Club President," she deigned to inform me. "The thieves didn't take much, really. Just a couple of old powered armor suits and an early iteration of the 'Damn Gun' mech, all from before we started etheric tech. Plus the locators for those items, which is why we have to turn to your parlor tricks instead of finding them ourselves." Prof couldn't have invented etheric tech without standing on the shoulders of a long line of mages studying "parlor tricks," you twit. Magic is magic, whatever you call it. I briefly considered contacting Hakase to have her tell this upstart the same thing with more jargon and much greater length, but as usual my sloth overwhelmed my spite.

"Thanks, Pres. That helps narrow it down." The Occult and Fortune-telling Clubs wouldn't have much interest in the nonmagical machines, and the militant faction of the History Club would have purged more technology. It was probably one of the art clubs purloining them in a fit of esthetic avarice. I turned to face the general mass of roboticists. "There are just a few clubs that could reasonably be behind this, and a handful more that could be unreasonably be behind it. It's too late in the evening to interrogate them tonight-"

"And whose fault is that?" called a malcontent slouching on the edge of the group.

"Her name's Koyomi, she never went here, find her if you want to yell at someone. In the meantime, trust me, I'm a professional, justice will be done and you'll get your stuff back soon. Just don't go haring off after anyone you think probably did it, because that'll just lead to more fighting and Ms. Rina being sad." Nobody wanted that. Rina has a set of puppy dog eyes better than most genuine puppies. "If you have suspicions or any other information that might be relevant, talk to the faculty about it or drop by during my office hours. Any questions?" There were none. As I left, the club members were hashing out who would be on what shifts to protect the unexpectedly remodeled room until it could be repaired.

As for me, I had to figure out what abnormality had Koyomi worried, and how much I could justifiably charge for it.


	3. In Which There are Answers and Questions

I have always found that when investigating an unknown element, it's best to go in armed for bear. Cyborg, spell-casting bear with a black belt in three different martial arts who hates you. The same applies when going anywhere on the say-so of an old enemy. Or doing anything more hazardous than going to the corner store in a crime-free neighborhood, and even that might be pushing it a bit. There are precious few stories about some sap who took a trip down the river Styx because he packed too much gun.

Besides my trusty moon-tipped staff, I carried a brace of fearsome and eldritch brews that would give me the strength to carry on, but could break the spirit of the unwary imbiber. Mixed in with them were some genuine magic potions, to enhance my normally unintimidating stats. In my pockets were a handful of dragon's tooth soldiers, because only a rank amateur discounts the value of an instant numerical advantage. Topping off the list was a card that would transform into an Ariadne-style broadsword with a shout of "Adeat," because I like to keep all my nostalgia in one place. It ain't exactly Al-Iskandariya, but then the Satellite of Love was decommissioned early on in Negi's negotiations.

The school was deserted by all but the sun, red as a drunkard's nose, when I flew over to take a gander at Koyomi's anomaly. As the rooftop marked on the map came into view, I took a swig from what was normally my hip flask, and returned it to the pocket inside my hat, where my other potables had displaced it. The suspicious summit looked entirely unremarkable from up here. I'd need a closer look.

The unremarkableness stunningly failed to dissipate upon said closer look. Nor did it vanish as I warily circled the designated area like the beginnings of a one-woman dogfight. Although...as I crossed west of the supposed anomaly, a few centimeters of the far end of my shadow seemed to vanish. Now that did pique my interest. As I stepped forward, more of my shadow disappeared, and I realized that this foreshortening was due to what appeared to be a column, about five meters in diameter, made up of scattered points of light. It must have been effectively invisible in the daylight, in the same way turning on a lamp in a bright room doesn't make it brighter. With evening well on its way to night, the contrast was greater, and the column easier discerned. It worried me that my potion-enhanced eyes hadn't registered it earlier. I supposed I really was building up a resistance to my liquid friend.

At any rate, now that I had determined that the anomaly was, in fact, anomalous, it fell upon me to investigate it using the most time-honored method. I poked it with my stick. Nothing happened. Well, Koyomi and company had walked through and apparently come out right as rain. I took a deep breath and stepped forward.

Blind. Deaf. Numb. Whatever you call it when you can't smell anything. My sensory boost went from full power to nothing fast as a bullet hits your gut. I hadn't felt so vulnerable, so weak, so like a mouse in the silent shadow of an owl since we took down the Lifemaker. Spinning to look all around me, I threw a handful of dragon's teeth to the ground as I spoke the melody of battle. The teeth remained inert, the melody impotent as my training shouted down my panic and reminded me to check the skies for danger. I looked up, and saw-

Asuna. In the sky. Looking like she hadn't aged a day since fifteen. At least her head, viewed as through a window. Right in the center of the column. Asuna's head was not supposed to be in the sky. Not this sky, anyway. None of her was. She was off with Negi and Ayaka and Fate doing important things somewhere else that was not the sky. If she was going to be in the sky she would have told me. I'd checked my mail just yesterday, so I couldn't have missed a letter. I'd seen pictures and video with her and Shiori in the same shot, so it couldn't be that again. What in the name of every god and half the devils was '' _Asuna_ '' doing in the '' _sky_ ''?

My frozen bewilderment was interrupted by a rather redundant command of "Don't move!" Naturally, I moved, at least enough to see who was ordering me about. It seemed to be a girl of about fifteen, standing about half a meter inside the column of what I now suspected was Magic Cancel, with a blonde ponytail and a beauty mark under her left eye. That, and the rest of her head, were the only bits that showed above what I figured to be one of the Robot Club's missing powered armor suits (I love it when two cases I'm working turn out to be the same case. It's such fun get paid twice for one spot of detecting.), and the double-barreled guns mounted on both fists were pointed directly at me. "Stay right where you are!" she emphasized, a touch shakily. "I will shoot you if you move."

She probably seen me coming, and waited until I entered the Magic Cancel so she'd have the advantage. Beauty Mark seemed inexperienced, but not fool enough to prioritize some reckless notion of "honor" or a "fair fight" over winning. I approved. Only the overpowered could afford to fight "honorably." In fact, I approved so thoroughly I was willing to offer her a demonstration of quality dishonorable fighting, free of charge. I threw my hat high and to the right. As expected, her eyes and guns followed the distraction as I charged at her, low and towards the left. Beauty Mark turned back to me soon enough to throw down her armored arms to block a left-handed staff thrust to her equally armored groin, leaving her face wide open for a spray of orange-curry juice from my right hand. She shrieked and opened fire at me. I'm not the world's largest target, but it's hard to miss at that range. Two rubber bullets slammed into my stomach and left thigh, two into my right arm and shoulder. I staggered, and she let fly four more right into my center of mass before I could recover. I dropped, and she hit me in the back with another barrage while I lay there, and then one more just to be sure. Pragmatic girl. I'd probably like her if she stopped shooting me.

Beauty Mark removed a gauntlet so that her now unencumbered hand could relieve me of my staff, my drinks, my remaining dragon's teeth, my occult-looking card, and my phone. She stepped over me, and I could hear her collect the teeth I'd tried to use earlier, before taking off somewhere with her spoils.

As I forced my battered body to stand, I couldn't suppress a grin. For one thing, Beauty Mark taking the trouble to frisk me for my magic items told me that they would resume functioning once I was out of this thrice-cursed Magic Cancel field, which laid one niggling worry to rest. For another, Beauty Mark was as ignorant in her own way about the point of combat as the most honor-bound twit. The point of fighting isn't to win. It's to accomplish your objectives. Sometimes, your objectives coincide with victory. Other times, you just need to spray your opponent in the face with something pungent, and keep her from confiscating the sense-boosting potion in your hat. A few bruises weren't going to prevent me from tracking Beauty Mark's orange-curry scent back to her hideout, but they should make our next meeting just a little more satisfying.


	4. In Which There is a Pleasant Conversation

Many people, many really quite fortunate and sensible people, don't have much of a vocabulary to deal with pain. They can go through life quite satisfied with describing all their injuries and maladies as "hurting." It is left to those of us who know pain with greater intimacy than a few casual flings to describe her with the proper poetry. There is "ache," the gentlest pain and the one most often welcomed. "Throb," sweeping in and out to ensure she never becomes too familiar to be attended to. "Twinge," small yet vigorous. "Smart," the fiercest one of all. The potion I was using to track Beauty Mark's scent enhanced my ability to feel them as much as my other senses, and all were enthusiastically making themselves known.

Unpleasant and faintly masochistic as it may sound, contemplating this sort of diction and how it applied to my current state kept my mind off of bringing horrific and creative vengeance upon Beauty Mark when I got my hands on her. I had friends among the Mahora faculty who would be certain to become unbearably cross with me if I did so. I was fairly certain there were also some moral issues restricting the amount of harm one was supposed to deal to teenagers who used nonlethal weaponry, but for the life of me I couldn't remember what they were.

Lost in those ruminations, even with my enhanced senses I only noticed Beauty Mark's return when I heard her gasp. I looked up at her, noting with a certain amount of trepidation that she was holding a roll of duct tape and two pairs of handcuffs in her bare right hand, and that the guns on her gauntleted right were aimed directly at me. She looked to be suffering from an equal amount of trepidation and much less experience keeping it bottled up, so I gave her my best calming smile and slowly lifted my open hands in a gesture of peacefulness. If I were Negi Springfield, that might have done it, green as she was. Then again, he might have needed to kiss her before she spilled everything she knew and most of what she guessed. Of course, to Negi Springfield a loss of magic is just a demotion from an anti-army weapon to anti-infantry. I'm not Negi Springfield. My way involves deceit, followed by strong-arming.

"You made excellent time, you know," I told her, sunny as midsummer. "I wasn't expecting you for a good seventy-three seconds. Let's do this properly, this time. My name's Ayase Yue, of Ala Alba."

"Yeah, I know. Uh, I mean, I'm Inoue Nanaho, of the Tea Ceremony Club." Tea Ceremony Club? Armed guards weren't their style. They were more likely to slip you anything from a laxative to a hallucinogen if you crossed them.

"Of course," I replied, trying to look as if her name wasn't any newer to me than mine seemed to be to her. It was good she was familiar with me. My reputation could only be a boon. "Now, I know I looked pretty bad back there. That's the price of relying too much on magic. You see, I use a very special potion to help me on my cases, one you didn't find when you searched me. It's an intelligence-booster, which was obviously off when I tried to attack you. I was absolutely kicking myself when it kicked back in, let me tell you. I mean, then it became so obvious that there's no reason for us to fight! I just need to need to give you a sip, and you'll realize why you should really be on my side. Lemme just get it out of my hat here..." As my used-car salesman patter died down, I began to move my hands slowly to my head.

"Wait! Don't move. I'll get it." Inoue set down the worrying instruments in her right hand and plucked my hat from my head, her armed and armored hand never wavering. After she stepped back to beyond the reach of my fists or feet, she retrieved my supersensory potion and let the barest drop fall onto her tongue. "Disgusting, but not poisoned," she muttered. I will never comprehend how such a multitude of people can have such a warped sense of taste. Strawberry and pepper, disgusting! In any case, she took a swig, and I took my opportunity.

Just like on the rooftop, I charged and Inoue shot me. Unlike before, the shocking-to-her loudness of her firearm's retort visibly pained her with her newly sensitive sense of hearing. Unlike before, I had access to the melody of battle, granting magical aid to my strength, speed, and ability to shrug off the rubber bullets that struck me. I grabbed onto the neck of her armor with both hands and slammed my forehead into hers as hard as I could. The headbutt, performed thus, is one of the more self-defeating moves in a brawler's repertoire, as it pains the user as much as the target. However, my aforementioned longstanding relationship with pain, even mystically magnified, ensured that I came out the better. With Inoue staggered, I had a chance to scrabble for the catch that would release her gauntlet. She recovered as it fell to the ground, so I grabbed her nose with one hand and twisted hard while my other hand searched out the release catches for the rest of her armor.

Inoue screamed in pain, than cried out again at the sound of her own scream. She tried to pry my hand off her nose, so I jabbed my fingernails into her cuticles and twisted harder. She didn't try again. By the time I'd completely divested her of her ill-gotten mail, she was crying tears of frustration and pain. At least, that's what I assume she was crying about. Sure doubted it was happiness. In any case, she seemed pretty well beat, so I switched to good cop mode and offered her my handkerchief before gently asking her who she took her orders from.

"The, the monkey lady."

"Asuna is behind whatever you're doing?" Because Asuna-in-the-sky wasn't surreal enough. I had a sudden premonition that I would end up chasing a white rabbit through a looking glass by the end of this case. And the rabbit would turn out to be Asuna.

"What? No. I think. We never actually saw her face, but she had this whole monkey theme going on. Monkey mask, summoned monkeys, stuff like that. It was a little weird, but she was right there with us about how Japan's losing touch with its own traditions and she had a plan that would let us defeat all the imperialist Western mages in the country so we could reclaim it."

"I think I know who you're talking about." Amagasaki Chigusa. It had to be. My involvement in her last escapade had been limited to running around in utter confusion and calling on the aid of a fellow Baka Ranger, but I'd been filled in enough to know her style. It was either her, a coincidence too great for me to credit, or a copycat with remarkably low standards. "Where's all the gear you took from me?"

"She took it. We're supposed to bring any magic stuff to her. Taking your phone was my idea. Sorry. When I told her about you, she got all excited and said to go fetch you because you'd be useful as leverage. I don't think she was going to hurt you." I tactfully refrained from asking if shooting me with rubber bullets several times at close range counted as hurting or not.

"Thanks. You've been a big help, and I'll be sure to mention that to the principal. Do you have a phone I can borrow?" I saw no particular reason to deviate from the strategy that I'd employed against Chigusa last time, especially since I'd done such a bang-up job at the confusion. Now it was time to call on a Baka Ranger. "I'd like to get Ms. Sasaki's help moving all this Engineering Club crap in off of the street."


	5. In Which There is a Giant Robot

Makie doesn't often become involved in my work, despite working much the same beat. Charitably, this is because her temperament is best suited to areas other than detective work. Less charitably, she was once outsmarted by a bush. Long story. Still, when you're backed into a corner and running on fumes and pigheaded spite, there's nobody better to have by your side. Precious few equals, either.

Once the pink powerhouse dropped by, I'd have enough firepower with me to be able to mount a raid on Chigusa's hideout to get back the stolen tech and my personal kit. The miscreants might be worried about their sentry's absence by the time we hit them, but they should still be waiting for her to turn up rather than bolting for another haven. As Inoue informed me, Chigusa was holed up in a clearing in the woods, which should provide ample cover for a pair as stealthy as Makie and myself. The one item I forgot to factor into my plans was the universe's longstanding grudge against me. As I idly fiddled with the scattered bits of armor, gathering them together into a pile, I noticed the distinctive shape of a Newspaper Club bug. _Damn_. Someone had been listening in, which meant I another call to make once I smashed the cursed thing.

I woke up the principal to let him know that if a giant, hostile robot, possibly able to cancel any magic or ki effects anyone threw at it, showed up, I had the situation well under control. As an afterthought, I added in a request to send a couple people out to the woods. It was possible that Chigusa wasn't the one keeping an electronic ear on her minion. Even if she was, it was possible she and her crew hadn't scarpered yet. It was also possible that it would rain lemon-and-onion juice tomorrow. Makie showed up just as I was hanging up, and I let her know that we'd need to drop by my office to pick up some backup gear I kept for emergencies. Inoue I left with the pile of armor pieces, after I extracted a promise to stay out of trouble. She seemed quite gratified by the trust I was placing in her. I don't think she realized exactly how easily I could track an inexperienced middle schooler, or noticed that I took a few important-looking armor widgets with me as I left.

Makie and I managed to get to my office without incident, and I felt no shame about the fact that she gave me a piggyback ride most of the way. No shame. None whatsoever. After all, she was uninjured and in much better shape than me. It was perfectly reasonable, and the only reason I didn't point that out to the catgirl waiting at my door was that I was sure it would be perfectly obvious to her once she knew I was injured.

"Koyomi, it's late, I've been shot several times and robbed once, and I'm probably going to have to fight a giant magic-proof robot before I can heal up. This had better be good."

"Oh, I was just here to warn you about the giant magic-proof robot that just showed up. Aren't you going to have the principal call the JSDF or something?"

I let Makie handle that one while I went inside to grab my broom and one of the few potions I hadn't brought with me the last time I went to see Asuna in the sky without diamonds. "Oh, we can't do that!" Makie entered full lecturing teacher mode as she continued. "Mahora and the Japanese government have entered into a tacit agreement. The government is willing to ignore things such as middle school teachers younger than their students, military-grade weaponry in the hands of children, and apparent supernatural events. In return, the chaos so common in our school must remain in our school, and be dealt with without inconveniencing or requiring the assistance of outsiders. Outsiders, such as the JSDF."

"So, what, are you going to get together the military clubs or something? I suppose in this school, that's about as good."

"Gasp!" I'm not kidding. Makie actually said the word 'gasp.' "I could never do that! What kind of teacher would force her students to fight in her place?"

"Negi Springfield."

"You've got it backwards. We always demanded the right to fight from him. And Ms. Koyomi? The first time I got involved with Negi's mission, three of the friends who went with me were enslaved. I don't want that to happen to my students."

"The mage teachers' spells and ki attacks aren't going to do a damn thing against what Chigusa has! You need to get help from someone who doesn't use them!"

"I don't use any of that, so it'll be fine."

"You think you're just going to take down seven powered armors and a mech all by yourself?"

"Of course not," I cut in, magic recharged, broom in hand, and smoke bombs in my pockets. "She's got me. Makie, let's go. Koyomi, stay back so your artificial body doesn't get disappeared."

The pilfered Damn Gun mech wasn't exactly hard to spot. Granted, the human-sized powered armors weren't precisely camouflaged, but when the fully assembled mech stood up, it topped the buildings. It was walking away from Asuna's aerial perch, so it must have done whatever it needed to with her. Fortunately, the metal titan and its jetpacked entourage didn't seem inclined to shoot me down as I flew in. I assume they were waiting for me to fall like like a chump as soon as I crossed into the anti-magic field. So sorry to disappoint.

I came in high and fast. I felt it the second I crossed the barrier, as the cushioning spell that made a seatless stick a reasonable mode of high-speed travel cut out. The momentum kept us going, our commendable grip strength kept us both on the broom, and Makie's quick work with her ribbon sent us spinning around the giant's torso to land safely on its back. Sleeping Asuna was ensconced in some sort of glass coffin attached there. Makie made as if to pry her off, but I shook my head. Asuna's magic cancel prevented Chigusa's tricks as surely as mine. Instead, I gestured down to the battery pack located just above the legs. Mahora-built robots tend to have vital components located places it would be very awkward to touch if they were on a human. I've never quite worked up the nerve to ask Hakase about that.

At this point, someone worked off the nerve to fire off a shot. It missed us completely, but more would follow soon, and with that many firing we'd probably take some hits if they were blind-firing. Still, there'd be more if they could see us, so I crushed a smoke bomb and got myself nice and cozy in a nook where Asuna's coffin – make that sleeping chamber for perfectly alive people – would provide me some cover from one side.

Around me, I heard bullets impact the robot like a rubber hailstorm. Below me, I heard the crash of what was almost certainly the mech's battery pack hitting the ground, because Makie's awfully petite. Above me, I heard something like rockets, such as might be caused by a mech's pilot evacuating in an attempt to escape justice. That wouldn't do at all.

"You take care of the kids! I'll get Chigusa!" I cried out as I clambered up the freshly debilitated mech. The Wielder of Five Weapons would be more than a match for half a dozen punks. I launched myself from the robotic head using my broom as a vaulting pole, trying to get as much height, and therefor distance from Asuna's field before I had a sudden stop. It worked, with the broom's flight magic kicking in less than a meter above the ground.

Chigusa was waiting for me there, and so was her water-summoning charm. The water didn't come high enough to do more than get my toes wet, so it struck me as singularly pointless until something grabbed my feet and something else slammed into the back of my head. I turned somewhat woozily and saw one of my own dragon tooth soldiers lifting its shield for another blow. Turn my own weapons against me, would she? I knew them better than her. I knew that the bones were easily separated, even if they snapped back into place just as easily. That meant that I could pop the hands on my feet off their arms long enough to send lightning through my broom into the water, dropping all of the soldiers she'd concealed there.

Apparently Chigusa didn't like that trick, as her next move was to summon a small avalanche of boulders down, to serve as platforms for her monkey-armored self and some assorted summons, including a vast frog, an even bigger spider, and of course a whole cartload of monkeys. All of which I could _fly right over_ , so I'm not entirely sure why she bothered. She summoned a tree directly in front of me as I landed behind her, which served as a momentary distraction, but I'd had enough incantation time to unleash Windstorm of Lightning through the branches and send her tumbling over-

The monkey's mouth was open. That momentary distraction had given her enough time to slip out of her armor and use it as a decoy. Confident in my victory, I'd let down my guard and was vulnerable to the attack that she had almost certainly already unleashed. Of course, at the time I didn't consciously think any of that. I just knew that I had to be somewhere else with all haste.

I launched myself backwards on the broom just as an enormous cat statue crashed into the space I'd just vacated. I heard mocking laughter from above, and looked up to see Chigusa held aloft by a great swallow, a fan of charms in her hands.

" _I_ can fly and cast at the same time, Western mage," she cooed. Was that my magic card hanging from her belt?

"Adeat!" It was my magic card! Well, now it was my heavy, distracting sword hanging from her belt, but you know what I mean. Knowing an opening when I saw one, I dropped to the ground, heedless of the water soaking my legs, and let loose a barrage of lightning arrows. Since Chigusa was just another squishy mage outside of her armor, that was all it took. The summons would mindlessly obey their last directives, which meant the only one that could reach me in the air would just flap there, holding its mistress. It had been quite a day. A shame I wouldn't be able to charge the Engineering Club for overnight delivery.


	6. In Which There is Convalescence and Revelation

Receiving my duly earned lucre took place at the school church the next day, while Cocone was taking a break from healing me. My visits to her were generally a slam-bam-His-love-go-with-you-ma'am sort of affair, but matters like a hoplite shield impacting my skull took more time and effort. Given that ending up like Asuna before her political kick would have badly stymied my major life goals, I appreciated the thoroughness.

First up was Rina, who seemed entirely too awestruck over my supposed heroism, given that it mainly consisted of browbeating a student, ferrying Makie to the action, and tussling with a monkey-suited xenophobe with a kidnapping fetish. Not exactly the deeds of which legends are made, but I didn't want to explain kidnapping fetishes to a bright-eyed ten-year-old, so I ended up simply ignoring the stunningly unwarranted hero worship. I made a token effort to offer Makie a cut of my fee for acting as my muscle, which she predictably turned down.

My meeting with the former members of Cosmo Entelechia proved rather more interesting. The whole gang showed up, including a buxom, green-skinned stranger who was introduced to me as Cassandra. They could all fit around the hospital-style bed with the privacy curtains up, but it was a near thing. She started up what promised to be a simply fascinating line of book talk about the '' _Libri Sibyllini_ '', but Shirabe cut us off before the conversation could build up a decent head of steam. Clearly, Ms. Violin still played for Team Evil.

"Here's your fee, Ms. Ayase," she told me, setting the money on my bedside table. "It was a pleasure doing business with you, and quite an improvement from when we were on opposite sides."

"Pleasure was all mine," I lied. Concussions are one of my three least favorite kinds of injury. "Don't think I've earned it quite yet, since I haven't had a chance to give you the rundown on what exactly the thing you hired me to investigate was."

"We've heard, thank you. Amagasaki Chigusa performing some sort of anti-magic ritual that was interfering with our artificial bodies."

"Yeah, but a quick phone call got me a few more details. Seems Chao did some shenanigans which resulted in us having two Asunas around, one to do her political thing and a sleeping one to keep the magic world running. First I'd heard of it. Seems only Asuna's closest friends and some magic world bigwigs knew anything about it. Wonder how someone like Chigusa found out."

If I was ever more desperate for money than usual, I figured I could challenge Koyomi to a poker game, and maybe tell her to bring her friends. Only stone-faced Tamaki and canny Shirabe had managed to avoid looking worried over that last, ever-so-casual remark.

"Perhaps she'll be willing to tell the authorities, now that she's incarcerated," suggested Shirabe, cool and unconcerned as an ocean breeze. "Of course, it's equally possible that she's got some outrageous lie thought up to protect her sources. I'm afraid some mysteries even you might be unable to solve."

"I guess. Oh, one more thing. I'd like to congratulate Koyomi." There was a general expression of confusion. "Before I went after Chigusa, she mentioned that there were seven powered armors with her. Turns out that's the exact right number. I didn't realize that until a few minutes earlier when Rina told me how many were missing. I mean, I could tell there was half a dozen or so, but it's damn hard to get a precise count, the way they were swarming around."

"She always did have a good eye for that sort of thing."

"Oh yeah, very perceptive. Managed to spot that Chigusa would be immune to magic and ki, even before anyone showed up to, you know, try to use spells and ki attacks."

"I spotted Princess Asuna in her coffin thing, and I know how Magic Cancel works," Koyomi piped up.

"Sure, that makes sense. Hey, something just occurred to me. Fate qualified as a Magic World bigwig by the time they did whatever sealing thing on the Asuna that Chigusa kidnapped. Maybe he knew about it. Maybe he passed that information on to his trusted foundlings, who passed it on to Chigusa. Maybe said trusted foundlings keep trying to pass mediocre-at-best lies past a detective who's rather short on patience and sics the authorities on them. Maybe they walk and maybe they don't, but I know for damn sure that they will be grievously inconvenienced in the process.

"See, the only reason we aren't right now surrounded by grim-faced types ready to take you in for questioning is that you went to the trouble to bring me in. There was no reason for you to do that if all you wanted was for Monkey Girl to succeed. What gives?" There was a pregnant pause. After a few moments, it gave birth to a series of baby explanations.

"All we ever wanted was to help people. To make it so that nobody had to end up as low as we did." That was Tamaki, showing emotion for the first time.

"Even if we didn't fight alongside Lord Fate, we wanted to help save the world. Some of us wanted to become healers, or to grow food so that nobody went hungry again. I became a scholar because I knew that we needed knowledge to fight against barbarism." Cassandra, if you couldn't guess.

"But once the war was over, everyone, people we'd bled to save, started treating us like monsters and criminals!" Homura, slamming her fist down for emphasis.

"Ms. Amagasaki had derived a certain notoriety among various parties due to her encounter with the infant version of Ala Alba. She had to be dealt with before she became a true threat, but nobody able to spare the time to solve a problem that wasn't yet a crisis would be convinced by a pack of unrepentant _terrorists_." Shirabe, gamely trying to maintain her calm facade even as she spit out that final word.

"So we thought we could leak the information about the Princess to her, and then get you to investigate, and then you'd find out about her and then she'd get taken out before she could build up a following of more than a handful of people. But we didn't expect that you couldn't call the [=JSDF=], or that she'd get a bunch of robots, or, well, that we'd be having this talk right now." Koyomi, swiftly going from excited to worried to sheepish.

"Life lesson, ladies," I proclaimed. "If you tell the truth, it's a lot harder for people to catch you in a lie."

"We can't help it!" shot back Koyomi. "You thought I was trying to pull one over on you from the second I stepped into your office!"

"You _were_ trying to pull one over me from the second you stepped into my office. Trying to distract me with a pretty pair of ears, it's downright insulting." I overrode the catgirl's answering splutters to continue, "Nevertheless, I'll make sure to put in a good word for you in whatever ears matter, and if you hear about something else that needs fixing, you can always let me know and I promise to give you a fair shake. Hope you enjoy your stay in Mahora."

We exchanged some pleasantries and they trooped out. Before she followed her friends, Koyomi turned back to me, blushing for some reason. "Yue?"

"Yeah?"

"My name, well, my real name? It's Torako. I-I just thought you should know." And she was gone, like a whiff of perfume fading in the breeze.

"Damn," said Misora, making me go for the gold in the high jump from a seated start. She must have been eavesdropping on the other side of the curtain. "You really are like catnip for beastgirls. If it works on guys, the twins better watch out."

"Shut up. Nuns shouldn't have such impure thoughts."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Book One


	7. In Which There is the Beginning of a Journey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Book Two: The Case of the Fiery Fortuneteller

Jack Rakan was on fire and it wasn't my fault. No, the blame for that minor inconvenience to Ala Rubra's resident gorilla impersonator must go to the young ladies formerly of Cosmo Entelechia. They had insinuated themselves into the tail end of what had become Ala Alba's week-long reunion on a purported mission of goodwill and reconciliation. Their hostile immolation, vengeance for seven-year-old lechery, had failed to undermine that mission, or to excite more interest than the picture of the twins' daughters. The White Wing had developed quite refined palates for mayhem, especially after reaching the legal drinking age, and those dilettantes had lit a fire without bringing a single marshmallow.

Substandard hooliganism aside, the shindig was was going excellently. Enemy chattered gaily with former enemy, veteran warriors as carefree as the children they'd been when they first took up their weapons. Even grim Mana, already a hardened soldier when she could count her years on two hands, had a smile on her face. A profound peace descended upon me.

It was promptly broken when _someone_ slipped an ice cube down my back.

Torako's excessive display of giggling struck me as entirely out of proportion to my perfectly reasonable reaction. "Nice leap, Yue. I guess you aren't an old lady after all. I was wondering, from the way you were sighing," she said as she wiped some dampness off her hands. Dampness that might have come from, say, picking up an ice cube. Hypothetically.

"She's always kinda been like that," said Nodoka from where she sat on my other side. "I think her first words were 'kids these days.'" She chuckled drunkenly to herself.

"It's called maturity," I grumbled. "I have to have a lot of it to make up for all of you tittering children."

"Maturity is important, but it's good to have fun sometimes too, don't you think?" asked someone who'd just arrived at our table. Negi Springfield. His face remained the perfect symbol of Beauty, the only Platonic ideal I'd ever personally witnessed. I could appreciate it better, now that he'd stopped giving me heart palpitations every time he came near. "Especially at a party."

"You know what's fun? Not having ice cubes dropped down my back. It's like going to an amusement park every day."

He laughed, and the world was a more luminous place for a moment. "Well, I know I was just talking about having fun, but I'm afraid I've got a favor to ask you, Yue."

"Finding Anya for you, right?" I savored his look of surprise for a moment before continuing. "This Ala Alba/Ala Rubra reunion has expanded to include the people who kidnapped a member of both groups, yet here it is finally winding down and still there is no Anya. There is also no Fate, but you specifically announced that he'd begged off." And of course there was no Arika, since she was rather busy being a statue until Konoka worked out a cure. "Then you come over here to ask a favor of the person whose job description includes, among other things, finding missing people. I've been studying rocket science, and this isn't it."

"All that makes me even more certain you're the right person for the job. Would you be willing to do it?"

"If you can get me to London and back, sure. Air fare's a lot of my money."

"I'll pay for your plane tickets and your normal rates, of course. I couldn't ask you to do this for free."

"Than this is business, not a favor. But thanks."

"London?" interjected Torako, who looked like she'd been holding it in since I mentioned the name. "Can I come? I've always wanted to see London. Big Ben, Bakers Street, Abbey Road, over two hundred and forty museums!"

I felt my eyebrow lift. "You've always wanted to see a city in the Old World? I didn't think people back in the Magic World had even heard of Europe, much less London."

"Fine. I've always wanted to see it since I found out it existed. It has Sherlock Holmes and _over two hundred and forty museums_ , Yue."

"I like you. Even if you helped the guy who killed my friends for a bit, you're cool. We should get drinks some time," said Nodoka.

"I'd be happy to pay for another set of tickets," said Negi.

"How about a third?" I asked. "You could come with us, Nodoka. I know you'd enjoy it."

She started, looking oddly guilty. "I can't. Prior engagement. Sorry." She let her hair fall in front of her eyes the way she'd worn it when we were young, like a few strands of keratin would keep the harshest part of the world at bay.

"Very well," said Negi, looking a little concerned but unwilling to pry. "Two tickets it is. I'll have them for you tomorrow. Thank you very much, Yue. If you'll excuse me, it looks like Hakase's waving me over. I better go see what she wants." With that he departed to shine his light elsewhere.

For my part, I was already preoccupied with Nodoka's odd reaction. What prior engagement could possibly make her respond that strongly? Torako looked from one of us to the other for a moment before standing up to go and saying, "Gosh, look at the time. I better go be out of earshot for a while. See you in a bit."

Nodoka squirmed in the heat of my practiced level stare. Her alcohol-eroded will crumbled easily before my ability to keep my eyes pointed at one place. "It's something for Konoka. She asked me not to tell anybody. It's too sensitive for the attention it'll get if someone like Negi or an Ariadne graduate gets involved. She mentioned an Ariadne graduate specifically."

Not exactly planning a surprise party, then. "So what exactly is so sensitive?"

Nodoka took a deep breath and a swig of liquid courage before leaning towards my ear and expelling the secret in a gust of hot breath. "The petrified Arika is a fake. The real one's been kidnapped somehow."

* * *

The plane trip to London gave me plenty of time to brood as Torako napped. Arika's absence had been the elephant in the room at the reunion, although some of my less cautious comrades might have partaken in enough of the hard stuff to see another kind of elephant. For all they loved him and had passed on some remarkably auspicious genes, Negi had the luck of a thousand broken mirrors when it came to parents. Some were simply orphans, and able to grieve and move on. My dear teacher, on the other hand, had lived most of his life with the ones who gave him life almost close enough for his reaching fingers to grasp. His long-sought father, once discovered, was the thrall and puppet of a mage so old and powerful to be more akin to a senile force of nature, and his mother was the victim of the same just-maybe-curable-some-day mineral affliction that ravaged his village. Even with his sire restored to freedom, and more recently, health, it was a miracle Negi remained functional and apparently happy. Nobody wanted to find out if the miracle stood up to the pressure of reminders about Arika's condition, let alone news that mother dear had been absconded with.

At least the unknown malefactor or malefactors had left us a lead while trying to cover their tracks. Geology and earth magic were never among my stronger suits, but I'd researched enough to know that petrified folk turn into a specific kind of rock, and it ain't exactly common gravel. Globetrotting Nodoka could travel to areas where Arika-sized chunks of the stuff had been removed recently and snoop around without raising the suspicions of any but the most paranoid.

Granted, "the most paranoid" was an apt description of the sort of people who could kidnap beloved, statuesque Ostian royalty and replace her with a decoy that fooled all and sundry who didn't examine it with Konoka's healing arts. Not much to be done about that.

The potential from Bookshop's mission finally exhausted, I turned my brood to the job I was actually supposed to be doing. There wasn't much to go over. Once Anya had discarded her bizarre mammary-based morality, we'd both determined we had little in common and had had little correspondence since. Her lack of communication could be due to being distracted by hedonistic excess that would impress a Roman emperor, monastic vows of silence and hermitage, or just forgetting to charge her phone and check her mail. I simply didn't know enough about who she was and who she'd become to say which was more likely.

Fortunately, the plane landed before I could get bored and make any truly extravagant hypotheses. "Wake up, Torako. If you don't stop drooling all over my nice shirt I'll send you back to Japan in the luggage."

"Ung. Mmf. You wouldn't be that mean. Not after I did that whole excited thing about getting to see the city," she said muzzily as she returned from dreamland.

"I'd send some postcards back with you. It'd be just like you were there."

Torako wisely chose not to test her hypothesis about the limits of my cruelty, and we disembarked without incident. Explosions failed to appear, enemies refrained from ambushing, and cryptic warnings unaccountably declined to be uttered by suspicious strangers. Either this excursion was going to be as uneventful as picking up milk from a store a continent away, or the other shoe was going to drop at terminal velocity.

Anya's apartment was located a brisk walk from the airport, making it easy for her to set up where spendthrift tourists would see her. Applying percussion to her door and accompanying it with entreaties to reveal herself produced no Anya, but did produce her rather agitated landlady, trying to be subtle about the steak knife she was holding. She calmed down considerably upon identifying us as well-groomed, polite young ladies who fit the picture of the concerned friends we claimed to be better than vicious hooligans or the kind of debt collectors who wield baseball bats and significant pauses. It transpired that about three weeks ago, Anya had paid her rent for the next six months and entered a state of most uncharacteristic hermitage. Her friends and neighbors were getting very worried, especially given the fact that she had made no evident attempt to stock up on food for her seclusion. The arrival of Torako and myself became the catalyst to unlock her door for a mass check on her. As a practicing detective, I claimed and received the right to the front of the crowd in case there was something unexpected and dire.

The moment when the door swung open demanded a sinister creak. Alas, the hinges were criminally well-maintained, and the only sound that accompanied their movement was some affronted bird caterwauling. The world simply has no sense of drama. The room beyond the drearily silent door had the lights off and the curtain drawn, so it took those without night vision heightened by magic potion or feline genetics a moment to adjust. I, however, immediately took in the dust of roughly five weeks' stillness, the disorder that fell well within the parameters of "no struggle, just messiness," and, of course, the life-size stone Anya in the middle of the room.

That extra moment of clarity gave me the time I needed to think up a cover story for the mundanes. It started with me giving out a great "Ha!" that made the general populace jump. "Oh man, you gotta be kidding me," I continued, striding to the statue and breaking off a piece of the hair. "This thing's solid stone, look! I thought some of my old classmates were the masters at playing silly buggers, but not even they smuggled in a solid stone statue! That's some serious dedication. Did one of you put her up to it?" There was a general no-ness from the throng. "Ah well, wherever she is, it must be exactly where she wants to be. A solid stone statue, I can't believe it. She'll no doubt pop up as soon as she decides the joke's over."

After checking bedroom and bath, the gathering dispersed with general good cheer. After all, Anya may have been impulsive and a mite odd, but she'd been taking care of herself just fine for getting close to a decade now. No reason to assume the worst. As soon as we were out of earshot, Torako spoke up. "You're going to need an explanation to those poor people about why the joke never ends."

"Not planning on that."

She raised one onyx eyebrow. "Konoka's that close, huh? Then you'll need an explanation for Anya about why you messed up her hair."

"Not planning on that, either." I passed her the chunk of stone hair. She gave it a moment of puzzled examination before gasping in shock and nearly dropping it. Torako knew as well as I did: petrified creatures are more detailed than the finest works of art. With the right equipment, you can see the individual lithic cells. On the side of the hair piece that had been connected to the rest, we should have been able to see the broken-off ends of individual hairs. Instead, the rock looked like any other bit of vandalized statue. Our Anya, like our Arika, was a fake.


	8. In Which There is a Name of Significance

I had never given any thought to how one would go about counterfeiting a petrified body. This was clearly an oversight on my part. A detective who cannot recognize and counter the most audacious schemes a criminal can conceive of is no more than a buffoon for a phantom thief to toy with. I did remember that the petrified were always transformed into the same variety of rock, of which we had a sample shaped like a lock of hair. Torako and I pooled our geological knowledge and came to the ironclad conclusion that the variety in question was most definitely grey.

Geology never struck me as a particularly interesting or relevant subject.

I missed my artifact deeply at that moment.

Nodoka was doubtlessly working with more specific information. Nevertheless, it seemed prudent to gather whatever leads we could at what was probably the scene of one or more crimes. To do that, I would need a pretense to tell Anya's mundane friends (the ones who hadn't wandered off, at least) about why I was gathering data to help track down their favorite fortune-teller. Fortunately, I had a cunning solution.

"Can any of you tell us anything that could help track down your favorite fortune-teller? If she hasn't popped up yet, I guess she must have gone off on vacation somewhere and just left the statue behind for some reason. I tell you, I'm going to give her such a piece of my mind when I find her. There wasn't even a note!"

My solution netted me a great torrent of facts and suppositions, which boiled down to a whole lot of nothing useful. Anya traveled little, even within the city. She mentioned her hometown in Wales occasionally, usually to compare it unfavorably to busy, sheep-free London. She spoke passionately and rather frequently about the far-off town of Mahora, the one place we could be most certain she was not. Torako and I heard manifold repetitions on that theme until we finally came to Anya's landlady, the final local to be questioned.

"This is cruel of you," she said.

"Beg pardon?" I replied.

"I'm not blind, and I'm not stupid. I may not know much about magic, but when someone involved with that sort of thing vanishes and there's a life-size statue of them in their room, I don't think they went on any vacation. And I figure if you could do anything about someone being turned to stone, you'd do it instead of wasting your time asking where she might have gone."

"I expect anyone in the know would come to about the same conclusion, and you'd all be wrong together. The statue is simply carved stone, and Anya is at large somewhere."

"You mean someone actually went to the trouble of... Are you kidding me? Have you ever heard of Occam's Razor?"

"Yes ma'am. My grandfather told me about it. Years later, I found out that one of my classmates, who I thought was just a scientific genius, was a time-traveling Martian warrior-mage from another dimension. The insights that floored the quantum mechanics geeks at the university probably came from her textbooks. Still a genius, though, because she would have read those books as a preteen at the latest. Oh, and she might be Martian royalty. She's certainly descended from it, but I'm not sure if she's close enough to count.

"Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that sometimes the hoofbeats are horses, but sometimes they're zebra-striped unicorns, and more than once I've seen them turn out to be dogs with coconut shells on their feet."

The landlady, whose name I realized I still hadn't gotten, executed a facepalm that Chisame would have approved of. "And I thought the world got weird when I found out there was real magic in it. Does-does Anya know about all these things?"

I was about to reply that she did, and about the robots and ninjas and whatever Sakurako was, too, but Torako beat me to the punch. "Because of, er, circumstances, I never got to know Ms. Cocolova very well, but I saw her courage and resilience in dire straits when she was just ten years old. And I've seen her allies defy gods, steal souls back from death, and walk away from paradise to continue the fight. Wherever she is, whatever state she's in, whoever's behind this, we'll bring her back safe and sound. I swear it."

Well. That seemed more reassuring than the response I was going to give. Admittedly, squawking like a chicken might be more reassuring than my plan of listing more things that could threaten Anya. Anyway, the important thing was that the landlady was actually smiling now.

"Well then. I suppose I had better tell you after all," she said. Wonder of wonders, would canvassing the neighborhood actually turn out to be useful? "Anya's fortune-telling didn't involve astrology, did it?"

I shrugged. "I never studied the field myself, but I don't believe so."

"You see, a few weeks ago, not long before she locked herself in her room, I overheard her muttering to herself about Aries. I asked her if she'd taken up stargazing, and she jumped about a foot and said she had no idea what I was talking about. I didn't press her because I figured it couldn't be that important, but now... I know it probably won't be any use, but any bit helps, right?"

"Cryptic words and phrases are a great detective's meat and drink. I'm sure we'll end up using it to crack the case."

A pair of quick phone calls told me firstly that I could merge my investigations with Nodoka's on a certain Grecian island, and that Negi would be perfectly willing to foot the bill for more plane tickets. At least it was a quicker trip this time. Torako came with me, on the grounds that it would be boring to go touristing about without anyone she knew.

Given the fact that Nodoka and I had had a weeklong, heartfelt reunion just a day or two ago, we elected to go straight to business once we were all settled in the hotel. Once Torako and I got Nodoka up to speed, she returned the favor.

"Like you've already realized, you need a very specific type of rock if you want to fake a petrified person and not have everyone from the magical world thinking something looks off about it. I'll be happy to get into the absolutely fascinating science behind it, but for now let me just assure that the only place you can get large enough unbroken pieces to carve life size statues out of is right on this island." Nodoka's businesslike look turned into a slight smile. "As a side note, it's a bit disappointing, but it turns out the rock's sedimentary, not metamorphic."

Given how long ago and desultorily I studied geology, it took me a beat before I chuckled. Torako just continued cocking her head and looking adorably confused. "...Okay," she said, "I'm going to assume this would be funny if I knew what those words meant."

Nodoka looked flustered as she tried to explain. "Uh, you see, there are three types of rock, and metamorphic is one of them, and that's rock that's been changed by heat and pressure, and petrification obviously changes people, so, uh, pun..."

Torako let her head drop. "Both of you really need to get out more."

"We've both travelled across two worlds. Heck, Nodoka's job is to go exploring places."

"I ain't saying it'll be easy."

Nodoka coughed lightly. "Anyway. Let's get back to business. The only people taking out large enough blocks of rock are working for one of three corporations: Aegis Kai Doru, the Cheiron Group, or," she paused with a big grin, "a certain Zodiac Inc. I haven't had the chance to investigate any of them much, but if Anya's been going on about western zodiac signs, we know exactly who to go after."

"Excellent," said Torako. "We'll need codenames and, of course, masks if we're going to be breaking into places and fighting people in a country with laws against that sort of thing. You know my group went with artifact-based ones, but calling both of you Book wouldn't really work."

Nodoka and I exchanged a look of surprise. We both knew that the weak artificial bodies the Fatettes had been put in were part of their sentence, the equivalent of confiscating a triggerman's gun collection. "Wait a second," I said. "'We'? When were you planning on telling me you learned to transform that body? Or did you somehow break the restrictions on channeling ki or mana through it? Very impressive, in any case."

"Yue, I didn't do any of that. I don't need to. Do you think your Ku Fei needs to use ki to be useful? Or Tatsumiya needs to use her demon half? I've spent the last seven years training this punishment of a body to its limit, and I got these," and she pulled a pair of long-bladed, glossy black knives from some hidden pocket or sheath on her back, "through three airports without getting caught, so I think I'm better than dead weight. It's not like this is the first time I've done something like this."

Nodoka and I exchanged another look, with somewhat less surprise and rather more regard. She raised an eyebrow; I knew the catgirl better, so the final decision was up to me. "All right. You're in. Still, I've got something I'd like you both to have with you just in case." I dug in my beg for a small bottle of what looked like black marbles with bits of wire coming off of them. "These are some flares I made. They pack quite a punch, so you shouldn't need more than one at a time. If we get separated and you need help, just light the fuse and toss it in the air, and the other two should see or hear it. If something happens to me, I'll be sure to do much the same with a spell."

"Bring lots of rope, too," piped up Nodoka. "Silk, hemp, wire, whatever you can get. In the library and the ruins, I've run short of rope plenty of times, but I've never had too much. Now, about those codenames..."

In the end, we decided on animal codenames. Torako was obviously Cat, Nodoka received Rabbit for her trademark long-eared backpack, I was dubbed Owl because of a mysterious quote-unquote "vibe" I was deemed to possess. Devising the plan took less time. Given that the warehouse in which Zodiac Inc stored its rock collection was by all appearances completely unguarded, the only plan we could make was "break in, hope the guard isn't some Negi-class threat on punishment detail, then figure things out from there." At least Nodoka's telepathy should let us hear him, her, it, or them coming.

Unfortunately, telepathy is notably ineffective against a simple mechanical trap releasing knockout gas. Fortunately, I had a counterspell prepared for just such an eventuality, along with a few other possibilities. Plans may not survive contact with the enemy, but you can't go wrong with a dozen or two countermeasures for anything that might come up. The few seconds of dormancy before my little trick kicked in was enough time for the guard to appear. He was clearly a ninja, which explained why he hadn't been seen before. I needed to remember to ask Kaede about the conjunction between "master of stealth" and "immediately recognizable uniform" at some point. Someone who actually wanted to blend in would wear navy blue for nighttime, not all that black.

At the moment, our new friend and his not-especially-stealthy outfit were between me and the members of my little party who didn't have something prepared to deal with every status ailment short of Doom. That was going to complicate my efforts to get them back on their feet.

I leapt to my own feet with a roar of "Eat this!" and two blasts of the mystic equivalent of a shot of adrenaline spiked with tiger blood in quick succession. As I'd hoped, my opponent mistook my spells for attacks and dodged them, giving me free shots at my fallen comrades.

What I didn't consider was the possibility that the ninja's dodge would take him over my head where he'd perform some kind of pressure point trick on my neck leaving me paralyzed. Naturally, that's exactly what happened. Since sufficiently nasty paralysis can stop your lungs from pumping, I'd gone to some lengths to ensure that my countermeasure worked damn near immediately. It was still annoying, as fighting ninjas so often is.

Case in point, the way Mr. X went bounding off again before I could get a spell off on him (it was only damn near immediately) and had the nerve to split into a dozen or so duplicates while in the damn air, surrounding me as soon as they touched ground.

"Eight-o'clock!" That was Nodoka, speaking very quickly and making me extraordinarily glad I'd taken the time to wake her up. Ninja-boy not being deaf, his real self booked it as I got my shot off. It seemed he'd had enough of jumping up and down, as he went left instead of up where I'd sent a blast of lightning to meet him. Not that he got very far before kissing the ground in a bloody-legged heap, a black-bladed knife that cut him landing alongside. Its twin flew off into the night to what would have been the ninja's right.

"Gotcha!" cried Torako as I wasted no time binding our fallen foe with arrows of wind, and then putting a quick heal on his legs before the poor thing bled to death. "Instant movement's only useful if I don't have an idea of where you're going."

"Now, let me find out what this guy knows." Nodoka placed her hand on that guy's head and closed her eyes in concentration. After a moment she frowned. "That's odd. As far as he knows, the rock's being excavated for the fossils inside it. He keeps thinking of that Jurassic Park movie Ne- the teacher got all giddy over."

"What about Anya?" I asked.

"He doesn't recognize the name." A pause. "Or the face." Another. "Or the voice."

"Could he be using some ninja trick to beat your mind reading?"

"He wasn't good enough to hide the noise of his thinking. That's how I could tell the real him from the clones."

"Maybe a Trojan horse maneuver? Letting himself get captured so he could trick us?"

"Something to consider," said Torako, blandly, as she looked up from gathering her weapons. "Let's go smash all the rocks in the warehouse while we think it over."

"Right, right, that'd be a dumb plan," I replied. "Rabbit, what's he know about 'Aries?'"

"He just started thinking about a war god. He seems confused by the question."

Torako almost dropped her blades. "War god. Oh no. We've had the wrong Ares. It's not Aries the sheep. It's the god those one guys called Mars, and that's what you call the planet where the Magic World is. Oh please let me be wrong."

"Talking about the Magic World just confuses him," said Nodoka. "I really think we've been off on the wrong track. Ares, the war god...'Aegis Kai Doru' means 'Shield and Sword.' Yep, he says Cheiron and Zodiac have been competitors for a long time, but Aegis Kai Doru came out of nowhere just a couple years ago. Man, we screwed up. Er, it seems he'd love to just forget about us, as long as we go and bother some other company."

I started lightly thumping my head against the warehouse walls. "Yes, that sounds like a wonderful idea. Sir, I am very sorry for the inconvenience and the knifing. Let me just cancel the binding spell and we'll leave and you'll never have to see us again." Usually I could at least start putting a plan into effect before things go catastrophically wrong.


	9. In Which There is an Emotional Reunion

Since we had no better plan and we were in the neighborhood anyway, we decided to go knock on the Aegis Kai Doru warehouse. Nodoka did the honors, for some reason saying "Little pig, little pig, let me in."

Torako and I exchanged confused looks which utterly failed to abate when a familiar voice responded "I guess I better, since I've got no hairs on my chinny-chin-chin."

And then who opened the door but Anya, looking happy as a dragon with a new princess and completely unharmed. That was definitely a Bad Sign. Such easy wins always are. "Hey Nodoka!" she said. "Still with the bunny backpack, I see. And you must be Yue, by the staff. Heh, you, Yue. Who's your friend? And why are you all wearing ski masks?"

"They keep our heads warm. You lose most of your body heat through your head, you know," said Torako as she shed her headgear. Nodoka and I followed suit. "I'm Torako, by the way, although I went by Koyomi when we met last. Sorry about the whole kidnapping thing, by the way."

"Nah, we're cool. As long as the maid dress wasn't your idea."

Torako turned quite an interesting shade of red. "N-no. Gah, I forgot about that. It was Tamaki's idea, I swear."

"Well that's all right then. Come in, everyone. It's more comfortable than you'd expect."

A small part of my brain resolved to tease Torako about the maid dress thing later. Most of it had been furiously occupied since Anya showed with trying to come up with a way for one of us to stay behind in case – oh who was I kidding – _because_ it was a trap. Anya had already seen that all three of us were present, and she was far too calm about Torako for us to leave her outside so as to not frighten her, and...

"Sounds great! Let's go, ladies!" chirped Nodoka, grabbing us each by an arm. _I sent Haruna a text saying where we went while her attention was on Torako. Let's spring this trap._

 _You're a genius,_ I replied.

_I'm a dungeoneer. You always always always make sure someone outside knows where you're diving, through whatever means you have. She got another one before we hit the other warehouse._

When Anya claimed that the warehouse would contain more than the expected comforts, I'd assumed that meant there would be more inside in the way of furniture than a ratty blanket on the floor next to a stack of those military meals Mana called MREs. Well, someone might be able to use one of the stone blocks as a chair, but given their size it'd be an awkward clamber. Apparently Anya thought our expectations were remarkably pessimistic. Then again, one of the people she was talking to was _me_.

Nodoka tsked. "You'd think a bigshot organization could spare a little money for some accomodations to keep their guards in top shape."

Anya slammed the door behind herself unnecessarily loudly. "The glory of serving Ares far outweighs some meager luxuries." Glowing protective charms flared into being along the walls and ceiling. From the looks of things, the building could serve as a creditable bomb shelter. Blasting out through the wall was not on the table.

We turned around, and sure enough the redhead had the glassy-eyed stare of a true believer. "It's not about luxuries," said Nodoka. "It's about efficiency. A futon costs a lot less than a guard that gets beaten because they're sore from sleeping on the ground."

Anya sneered. "We little need such meager advantages. How could we, with such blind fools as you as our only opponents? Look how blindly you wandered into my trap!"

"For the love of Kant, woman, get some synonyms," I said. "Here, I'll spot you paltry, pitiful, and scant for meager, and I'm not even a native speaker. Can you think of something better than calling us blind again? Oh yeah, and we knew it was a trap. We're just good at escaping that sort of thing."

I guess she didn't appreciate my advice. Some people are really sensitive about that sort of thing. "Worms! Dogs! Kneel before me and submit to the glory of Ares or your charred and petrified corpses will be delivered to Arika's treacherous bastard for him and the rest of his filthy mudborn whores to weep over!"

Now, Ala Alba is nothing if not contentious, and insults flying between members is nothing to make a fuss over. I heard worse every time Asuna and Ayaka had to spend thirty consecutive seconds in the same room. Heck, Anya herself had let loose some serious vitriol directed at the more buxom members of the class without any repercussions. This frothing cultist before me? She was not the Anya we knew. She was not one of us. She was not allowed to speak that way about my friends, and nor was whoever had brainwashed her. For the moment the fury choked off all my words, but the low, inhuman growl emanating from Nodoka spoke for us both.

The less-affected Torako just snorted and drew her long knives. "Seven years ago, me and half a dozen others took on an entire world and only lost because the boss switched sides on us. You really think I'd surrender to you because, what, you outnumber us one to three?"

Anya signaled her disapproval of the catgirl's attitude with a fireball. Torako dodged around a stone block that the flame dissipated harmlessly against, and the battle was officially joined.

I returned fire with some wind, which Anya dodged annoyingly easily. Air is supposed to be hard to see, for crying out loud, even when it's moving. The exchange continued for a few more volleys, her evading so casually it looked like I just had bad aim, while I had avoided her strikes by dint of actual effort. Such battles of attrition are generally losing propositions for me against mages with rather lower magic reserves than a Meridiana graduate, but it worked great as a distraction to allow Nodoka to sneak around Anya's back with her silent steps and cold-cock the squishy caster, as Eva would say.

Well, except for the part where Anya spun around and set Nodoka aflame just before she struck. Nodoka's reinforcement magic meant that sort of thing wasn't nearly as fatal as one would expect, but I figured it would be best to try and end things quickly just in case. I unleashed a barrage of homing lightning arrows, angled to hit from above so that the fire mage couldn't dodge and let the arrows hit my friend. She could still jump back and drag Nodoka into their path, though. I managed to send the magic missiles jolting back, which actually made Anya jump a little and release her hostage. I'd have considered the whole thing a wash if it weren't for the energy I'd expended.

The expected return shot wasn't directed at me, but off to my left where it sent Torako yelping and dodging back behind her stone shield. That clinched it. Anya was reacting to things she had no business being able to react to.

"'Nodoka! Can you disrupt her telepathy?'" she suddenly yelled, mockingly, taking the words right out of my mouth. "Because of course that's what the _professional fortune-teller_ is using to see attacks coming."

Well sure, when she put it that way. See, telepathy is what I'm most used to seeing used for such things. It's what my best friend specializes in. Of course it was the first thing I'd think of in the heat of battle, and the smug brat could shut right up.

In any case, Nodoka appeared to have come to same conclusion regarding the likely result of continued strife against a precognitive pyromaniac that I had, judging by the way we both bolted for Torako's rock. Naturally, Anya sent great gouts of fire into each of our paths, but with her Cantus Bellax and my flying staff we were both able to avoid any serious harm. Our success at that endeavor had the gears in my brain spinning, but Nodoka proved hers had already finished when she grabbed Torako and me and initiated the mind-to-mind council of war.

_She can't predict reactions to her own actions! When you moved those homing arro-_

-ws so they wouldn't hit Nodoka, Anya couldn't see where I'd move them. She couldn't see how we'd dodge her own attacks, either. Of course. Before the telepath could finish her explanation, though, Torako had broken the connection and gone around the side of the block.

"Wait! Wait!" she called. "I give up. You're too powerful. I know the winning side when I see it." Her blades clattered to the floor. Peeking around the side, I could see her walking slowly toward a smirking Anya, hands held behind her head. Anya was cooing about the rewards of prudence and loyalty as the catgirl came closer, now within arms' reach. I almost missed the blur of Torako swinging her fist toward the witch, but I couldn't miss the flame she answered with, or the explosion that slammed both of them to the ground.

Nodoka and I rushed to the sides of the two fallen girls. Neither showed any inclination to get up at the moment. Anya was a traditional mage, without a mage knight's ability to take a pounding, and Torako, Torako had been weakened until the Powers That Be decided she couldn't be a threat, oh why had I let her come in the first place? It was clear that the damage to the catgirl would need a far better healer than me. All I could do was grip her hand, the unburnt one with the full complement of fingers.

"You were right," she grinned. "Those flares you gave me do pack a wallop."

"If you'd waited just ten seconds, we could have come up with a plan that didn't involve you punching a fire mage with an improvised bomb. Or breaking a surrender, like some kind of terrorist."

"Hey, she started it when she invited us into a trap! And I can't trust you pampered schoolgirls to come up with a decent battle plan."

"Right," said Nodoka, who'd just finished tying up an underage girl. "Looks like we'll have to get Konoka to heal you both, and then I should be able to dig the crazy out of Anya's brain, no problem."

"Run program: Maenad," said Anya in an affectless voice. Then she screamed and thrashed, as sigils I couldn't identify (not a common occurrence) appeared on her skin. The screaming only lasted a moment before shifting into something more guttural, and the thrashing ripped through the rope binding her. Before any of us could react, the no-longer-frail girl had swung her left hand into Nodoka and her right into me, sending us flying with rib-breaking force.

Problem.

The cracking of my ribs aside, being flung across a warehouse filled with unyielding monoliths was but a minor inconvenience, given that I held on to my staff and its cushioning safe-flying spells. I'm not entirely sure how Nodoka managed to avoid performing an impression of a squirrel meeting a windshield, but I understand it wasn't her first experience with suddenly falling sideways.

Actually, this was one of the rare cases where not being punched across the room was the path of greatest danger. After all, the unpunched Torako was the only one in the room still in range of the fists Anya was ready to bring down on the catgirl's defenseless, injured body.

One of the side effects of the safety mechanisms on flying staffs prevents the reckless user from going "too fast," i.e. fast enough to traverse the length the warehouse before Anya landed an unfairly hammerlike blow on my downed comrade. Overriding that little feature is quite illegal, and in some locales officially considered impossible. Now I figure those laws were put in place to protect the terminally impetuous, so rescuing Torako perfectly adhered to the spirit of the rules.

My unlawful velocity left me with a bloody nose, a pair of blackening eyes, and a bone-deep satisfaction when I shoulder-checked Anya. Her flesh felt as adamant as the rocks behind me, but I did knock her a step back. That reminded me that even mages and ninjas and every other damn thing can only cheat Newton so much. Anya might be stronger than she had any right to be, but she shouldn't be any heavier. In the spirit of scientific enquiry, I resolved to test this hypothesis by sending her upwards via an Axe of Lightning. If I'd been thinking just a little faster, I would have held back my power just enough to avoid launching her all the way to the ceiling, where she would have a platform to leap off of back down to me. As it happened, I came to that particular realization just in time to dodge her downwards charge. Well, mostly. Instead of crushing my skull and torso, and all my very favorite organs held within, she merely landed on and broke my staff arm in two places.

As I rather loudly and incoherently expressed my dissatisfaction with the resulting sensations, and Anya turned to no doubt offer me sweet release from mortal pains, my hand closed on the fortune-teller's discarded wand. I whipped it up to send an arrow of wind right down the maniac's throat. Students of wind magic learn early on, and usually forget as useless trivia, that it is a fairly simple matter to alter the gas composition of summoned air. For instance, one may cast wind spells using air completely devoid of oxygen, but one usually has rather more effective options available than blocking off ones opponent's breathing with such a spell.

My little trick bought me a few moments as Anya clawed at her own throat, but she then noticed the wand's proximity to her teeth and decided the most effective solution was to bite the offending focus in half, along with several of my fingers. I was saved the trouble of figuring out what in the name of every deity ever conceived of my plan I-don't-even-know-what-letter would be by the extraordinarily timely arrival of dear, sweet, precious Nodoka and her knack with mind magic. All it took was a moment or two of her hands on either side of Anya's head and the redhead was dead to the world. I'd have gladly imitated her if my nervous system weren't so intent on informing me that yes, I was still badly injured. Gee, thanks. I had no idea.

I felt Torako's undamaged hand grip mine, and looked over to see her smiling at me. Well. Perhaps there were worse ways to spend the time, at that.

I spend entirely too much time in hospital beds, considering all the skillful magical healers I surround myself with. And yet when I tried to make the most of it and enjoy a decent sleep for once, Miss Konoe I'm-so-sweet-and-innocent-tee-hee Konoka felt the most logical course of action was to start tickling my feet.

"I see your reflexes are doing fine," chirped the she-devil herself over my flurry of sleep-slurred, bilingual invective. "How are your fingers feeling?"

I cycled through all the impolite gestures I knew how to do with one hand. "About normal for being freshly regenerated."

"This happen to you a lot?" asked Torako from the next bed, doing her less obscene finger exercises.

"Not since the Ariadne final exams, but they're some vivid memories. Konoka, I'm assuming that since you woke us up you've got some news to share?"

"Of course," the healer replied. "Now this Aegis Kai Doru, ah, do either of you know very much about finance?" I know that money is nice and mostly happens to other people. Judging from Torako's expression when we shared a glance, either she knew about as much or some wicked painkillers had just kicked in. "I'll take that as a no. The short version is, a lot of the resources it's drawing on come from Mars, which isn't supposed to have anyone on it, so it isn't coming legally. Once our people bring the company to the powers that be, they should dismantle it in short order, and they won't really care if some random warehouse got broken into. So congratulations.

"Anya's case is more of a good news, bad news, thing. The good news is that she's alive and sane and talking and should make a full recovery. The bad news is that the full recovery is going to take a while. That maenad thing…."

"If she's talking, I've got some questions for her," I said, moving to get out of bed.

"Oh, she's sleeping right now." Oh really? You let people sleep now? What a fascinating idea. "She did say that these Ares people are after a Mars for Martians, meaning people whose ancestors were created by the Lifemaker. Not exactly fond of Arika marrying someone from Earth."

"Wonderful," said Torako, suddenly sounding bitter as wormwood and older than she had any right to be. "Another reason for people to hate and kill each other. I mean, we were running out. Pretty soon we were going to have to start a war over whether vanilla or chocolate ice cream is better."

It struck me that we'd never exactly spoken about her past. I leaned over the divide between the beds to put a hand on her shoulder. "If they're bigots, that means that they've got a blind spot for us to exploit. Not that we really need the help. We'll rescue the people they've taken, protect the people they target, and heal the people they've hurt. That's what Ala Alba does, and you're just a pin short of membership by this point anyway." I turned to get confirmation from Konoka, but she seemed to have slipped out, leaving the two of us alone. That was a little odd.

"And here I was expecting you to tell me that getting blown up proves I'm out of my depth here and should leave the heroing to the schoolgirls."

"Ha ha, no. Negi used to try that all the time when we actually were schoolgirls and nobody ever even considered listening. That reminds me, if we're going to be working together, and I'd like to, you having the artifact from a pactio would come in hand-"

And then Torako was kissing me, and my train of thought was quite thoroughly drowned out by an angelic chorus. The beatific, androgynous kind of angels, not the burning wheels covered in eyes. I did manage to remember my own name, though. After a disappointingly short time, she drew back and raised an expectant eyebrow.

"See, you actually have to do it in a magic circle or it doesn't work," I said, bland as dry toast.

She gave a haughty sniff. "Well, yeah. I just had to be sure the artifact would be worth it."

"Picky, picky. In my day, you made the contract first chance you got, if you had to make out with a ten-year-old to do it. I guess schoolgirls are more pragmatic than terrorists." That got me bopped with a pillow.

"Go back to sleep. I demand more beauty sleep from you if we're going to do this for real. A gal's gotta have standards." How could I refuse such a sweetly-worded request?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Book Two


	10. In Which There are Usual Suspects

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Book Three: The Case of the Bloody Beautician

I flexed my fingers, gratified to find them at last feeling as if they'd never been severed by the teeth of a berserk fortune-teller. For all the power of magic and technology, I've never yet heard of a healer who can regrow that much tissue without leaving behind odd sensations for weeks. Anya's recovery was taking a mite longer, but she was safe in the care of the finest healers Negi's not inconsiderable influence could provide. Zodiac Inc., her brief employer, had been demonstrated to exist more on paper than in fact through some arcane process I don't pretend to understand or care about, although all the big fish had scarpered and were being hunted down by those with a rather wider focus than my little hometown-hung shingle. All in all, my life had settled back into its comfortable routine, which tonight meant I had an assault victim to take a gander at.

The degree to which I was accustomed to being handed cases of students on the down end of a beatdown says quite a bit about Mahora, if not necessarily the bit an outsider would hear. For your meek and mild member of the common herd, I dare say our school's safer than most. Fights take place between the strong, because attacking the weak just gets you a fight with their stronger clubmate anyway, so you might as well go straight for the badass and fight at a time and place of your choosing. Still, the Powers What Are do not officially condone violence as a problem-solving method among the students, and when nobody else feels like doing the legwork they tap me to mark the targets for the hammer of justice. It's rarely particularly interesting or challenging work, but in my line of business that tends to be a plus.

I was trying to explain all this to Torako, who still seemed to consider Mahora essentially an upscale warzone, when we reached the nurse's office, where our vic would be stored until whoever was currently on duty decided they'd been fussed over enough. In the general course of things that would be the nurse, but the woman was only human and at this time of night she'd be off having some sort of non-career-related life while her station was manned by some particularly dedicated Health Club member.

Right now the member in question was Kamiya Kirino, dressed in a camouflage-patterned nurse's uniform. Her dark green hair was military short and her eyes burned like a junkie's cigarette. "Detective Ayase!" she barked, coming to an attention marred only by the fact that she seemed to be vibrating, "Regret to inform you that patient remains unconscious from injuries and unable to provide information!"

_I'm convinced. This is a safe place and the students are in good hands,_ Torako, dry as a salt lick, sent over our pactio connection. My intention in making her my ministra had been more to preserve her rather fragile physical shell than to enhance her ability to editorialize, but our jobs together had been quiet so far. Not too quiet, as every phantom sensation in my regrown fingers had reminded me. Just quiet enough.

I ignored my partner's sarcasm. I am, after all, a professional. I nodded acknowledgement of Kamiya's report and stepped over to take a gander at the current convalescent, sipping from a can of durian juice as I did so. From the bits I could see, Jane Doe looked to be formed mainly of bruise. Probably a noncombatant, to have been taken down that hard without a foe laid out beside her. The perp better pray I got to them before the vic's club champion. _I'd_ just deliver them to the faculty, who had lines they weren't allowed to cross. Fortunately, I had a way to get some answers from our injured friend. Ethically, even. Among the potions I'd brought was a mixture of a little bit of wake-up juice and a whole lot of painkillers, brewed for just such an occasion. I carefully opened up Sleeping Beauty's mouth and dribbled in a little bit. She stirred, his puffy eyes fluttering open.

"Don't worry," I said. "You'll just need to be up a moment. Do you remember who left you beat up like this?"

"No idea," she murmured drowsily, because of course it couldn't be easy. "Felt something hit the back of my head, then woke up here." Since I could see from here she'd been hit worse from the front than falling over would do...had the perp kept whaling on her post-unconsciousness?

"All right then. Can you tell me your name? And your club?"

"Koyama Mari." She yawned hugely, and gave me just two more words before Morpheus claimed her once more: "Beautification Club."

My mouthful of durian juice suddenly took a detour down my breathing parts. Kamiya spluttered in disbelief as Torako clapped me on the back. "What," the only non-Mahora girl asked in bemusement, "do they have nameless Things anathema to reality picking up litter for them?"

Kamiya answered, since I was preoccupied trying to remember that air went to lungs and juice went to stomach. "No, that's more Astronomy Club. Uh, sir. Beautification Club doesn't have _anything._ They just don't fight. This is...this..." Words failed her, and she was reduced to explaining through vague and expansive hand gestures.

"Attacking a member of the Beautification Club is like boxing a soup kitchen volunteer with brittle bones and their hands tied behind their back. And fouling." One of the fringe benefits of detective work is that it makes you good at pulling out similes at short notice. "They're protected not by their own strength but by the fact that anyone who messes with them will be regularly getting their ass kicked on general principle until they graduate. This is, quite simply, unprecedented." I gave Kamiya my best penetrating gaze. "I'm going to have to ask you to keep this completely under wraps until I know what's going on. Someone starts asking you questions and you can't think of a good lie, you don't know anything. Understand?"

Kamiya made a salute that could have taken my eye out if I'd been closer. "You have my word. Whatever it takes to bring this fiend to justice."

I returned the salute. Kamiya might be a touch odd in the brainpan, but she was good people. That put her a solid step above some of the people I was going to have to palaver with to get this done.

* * *

Since my employers didn't appreciate me pulling random students out of class to be suspicious at, I whiled away the hours until school let out drawing up a list of the least unlikely people I could think of to have attacked a Beautification Club member. I made sure I would have plenty of time to think by attacking the astrophysics book that would be my eventual gateway to work in space. It had long been my observation that attempting to study produced a time dilation effect that could make minutes take hours, the effect being reversed if there was a test the next day. Those principles had to be the key to Chao's time travel technology, I was certain of it.

When class let out later that day, after a span of roughly two weeks, Ito Chidori was my first target. The Cheerleading Club president was a compact thing with big blue eyes, pink pigtails, and a fuse small enough to be subject to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle where her chosen sport was concerned. She'd first come to my attention after Barahime of the Boxing Club and Hanagata of the Hockey Club had clumsily ran into her tiny fists a remarkable number of times after being less than respectful of the noble and strenuous art of cheer in her presence. The thing was, she'd never done as much damage to those who invoked her ire as Koyama had evinced, even when they actually had the chops to resist. Sure enough, she showed no recognition of a pre-beating picture of the vic I'd acquired. Ito didn't have that kind of emotional control. Dead end.

Osawa Tsutomo came next. Like many luminaries of Mahora's tech clubs, the underfed, hollow-eyed bioengineer was known to have the occasional lapse where it came to keeping his creations in the lab and under control. Unlike the others, he was prone to incorrectly assume he could handle it himself until matters had moved well past the crisis point. I don't understand why anyone would try the "I am your creator, you were created to serve me, obey my commands, and crush my enemies" speech twice, given how well it generally works the first time, but Osawa never seemed to learn. On the other hand, the lack of any devastation other than that to Koyama was most uncharacteristic of his escapees. Plus, as I swiftly determined, he'd been preoccupied for weeks with something called "floss crabs" that were too small and delicate to do the damage I'd seen on Koyama. Another deceased conclusion.

Lucky number three was the Drama Club's Katsura triplets, Rei, Rie, and Rio. Evidently, they were born to parents with a very limited concept of what constituted a proper name.

_So how exactly do these three act their enemies into the hospital?_ queried my faithful if bemused companion on the way to where I'd been assured the trio could be found.

_Mainly by going "hey Chiwa" and letting her take care of it,_ I replied. _And before you ask, it wasn't her. She's a doppelganger, so she's very strict about making sure someone in authority knows exactly where she is at all times. That way she doesn't have to worry about getting blamed for disguising herself as whoever's most recently transgressed._

_What about when she gets in fights, does she just go and tell a teacher she beat someone up?_

_You have no idea how much the faculty loves her for that. In any case, they aren't much inclined to violence._ "We are here," I called out now that I was in ear- and eyeshot of my quarry, "because there is a secret here, and the time has come for it to be secret no more!"

Rie opened her mouth to no doubt assure me that all three were so open and transparent they regularly had birds run into them, but I forestalled her by holding up a finger. "See, I took the trouble to get good looks at these three until I could tell them apart from one another. No twin impersonation shenanigans will succeed on _my_ watch. While so engaged, I noticed some reactions curiously similar to those of people who are hiding something from those whose job it is to uncover the hidden. Some get nervous and jumpy, like Rio to your left. Others, like Rei over there, get more calm and confident than any innocent, because they're certain they've covered their tracks."

"This is ridiculous!" cried Rie with precisely the mix of fear of authority and indignity at its ill-use the unjustly accused would have. "Being jumpy is suspicious, being calm is suspicious, that's just how my sisters are!"

I nodded in response, then let out the loudest chicken noise I could, making Rio, Rei, and Torako all jump slightly and look confusedly at this madwoman in their midst. Rie joined in the staring after a brief moment, which was plenty long enough for me. "And some," I said, "are very good at acting like an innocent would, but get so focused on keeping the mask up that they can't react naturally to surprises." I bared my teeth in smile-like fashion.

"Did you never have secrets at our age?" Give the girl credit, she didn't fold easily.

"Maybe one or two. But this is a dark hour, when secrets become suspect."

"Does she hear herself talk?" Rie asked Torako.

"I think it's supposed to be intimidating," she replied.

"The point stands," I said, trying to get things back on track. One of the people present was well aware I'd helped save her world. You'd expect that to produce a modicum of respect, if you were quite naïve.

"What's this big crisis, then?" asked Rie, folding her arms and raising an unintimidated eyebrow.

"There's been an attack," I said, trying to watch all three faces at once. "On a Beautification Club member." Three identical expressions of shock and horror greeted me, like someone who'd found a corpse in a hall of mirrors. "And with the suspicious behav-"

"I'm a guy," said Rei.

"-vviioorrr...Wait what."

"I'm a guy," Rei repeated, missing the actual point of my question-like statement. "That's the secret. We are not three identical triplet sisters, we are two identical twin sisters and a fraternal twin brother and yes I know the odds against are simply astronomical but, hey, so are the odds against winning the lottery and someone always does." I'd gotten back enough presence of mind by the end of this to note that the general air among her, rather his, sisters had been "Damn, Rei's admitting it," than "What on earth is Rei talking about I mean oh yes that is absolutely true" throughout. Which was nice, because the only methodology presenting itself to me to determine the veracity of Rei's claim was not one I was particularly sanguine about performing on a student, especially with Torako present and observing.

"You realize I'm going to have to check that," said Torako.

Rei's face assumed the cast of one promising to hold the line as long as possible, Rio's that of one attempting to percolate through the ground by sheer force of desire to be elsewhere. Rie smiled with a knife-edge that made me wonder if Chizuru gave lessons. "It's a great pity that statements such as 'over my dead body' are considered overused these days."

"Wha- gah! No!" Torako explained. "N-not that! Not that at all!" she clarified. She took a deep breath and let some of the blood flow out of her face. "Look. You're aware that there are people with abilities beyond normal humanity, right? Given how terrible this school seems to be at keeping it under wraps."

"The only people who don't know about magic by this point are some of the techies, who think it's all science in disguise, and Misato, who might just be messing with everybody," said Rie.

"Right then." Torako let her cat ears appear. "I myself have keen senses. So keen, in fact, that if I get impolitely close I can smell whether someone is male or female." If her nose was that sensitive in her less furry form, I thought I might need to be a bit more scrupulous about keeping things cleaned up.

"If it'll get this conversation over with," Rei spoke for us all. Torako gave him a quick but thorough sniffing and pronounced his scent suitably male.

"Which raises the question," she continued, "Of _why_ , in the name of _everything_ , does there have to be this whole conspiracy?"

"He's family!" snapped Rie. "We're not going to be separated just because our middle school won't take boys!

"There's a boy's school on this very island! I have seen boy students your age! I have seen boys and girls in the same club! Is there something in the drinking fountains here? Why is everyone on this island out of their damn minds?" Torako looked like she was about to cry from sheer frustration.

"Now maybe family doesn't mean anyt-" At this point Rie was distracted from her angry retort by the business end of my staff suddenly poking her in the nose.

"I think you wanted to stop talking about half a sentence back," I said, very calmly. It was gratifying how seriously she was taking the moon-topped stick leveled at her. We really had come a long way from the CG Excuse. "So let's all agree that that's what you did. Right, Torako? Torako?"

My partner slowly returned her knives to their sheathes and unclenched her fingers. "Yeah. Sure. We're done here." She strode off without waiting for me to follow.

* * *

While my education has been thorough, and was eventually attended to with diligence, comforting ones girlfriend after she has had an unpleasant reminder of childhood trauma is a subject entirely absent from the standard curricula of either Mahora or Ariadne. Perhaps it was in an elective I missed. Still, one picks up a trick or two over the years.

"That was certainly an exciting waste of time, but now I find myself in need of nourishment," I said. "Would you care to head over to the Chao Bao Zi with me?"

She nodded, to my relief. While not quite what is was when Satsuki helmed it, the eatery's wares could still serve as an all-purpose balm to troubled souls. Torako remained silent until our meal arrived, and only picked at it when it did. I tried for a safe conversation topic. "I had no idea your olfactory abilities were so strong in your current body. I'll have to make some adjustments to our living quarters."

"What? Oh, that. I just made that up to see if they thought they had anything to fear from it. I didn't use to be sneaky like that, you know. You're a bad influence on me."

"Next thing you know I'll corrupt you into committing acts of terrorism."

"I _thought_ I saw your schoolgirl face on those wanted posters." The familiar snipes had evidently done their job relaxing her. At least, she was now smiling and actually seeming to enjoy her repast.

As was generally the case with Satsuki's recipes, by the conclusion of our meal the world had become a brighter, more welcoming place than when we'd sat down. Which brightness dimmed a bit when a shadow fell upon be, cast by none other than Kitsu Megumi, the current manager. Oh dear. The day had left me in no mood for this.

Kitsu was dressed, as ever, in an artfully rumpled suit accented by a pair of sunglasses and the edge of a dragon tattoo peeking out at her collar. I knew the tattoo was temporary, and reapplied every morning. All who were aware of the tattoo were fully cognizant of its transient nature, but few dared speak of it. The unspoken consensus was that pressing Kitsu too hard on her pretenses would lead to her severing a finger digit or two in an attempt to bolster the illusion.

"Ah, Ms. Ayase. Always a pleasure to have your distinguished patronage." Kitsu was smiling. She always smiled around me. It was roughly as convincing as an indifferently carved pumpkin.

"Thank you, Ms. Kitsu. I can't imagine why the manager herself might need to come over and mention it over a little thing like a meal I'm going to be paying full price for because I know you're not stupid enough to try bribing me again." I wasn't smiling. Not that I'm particularly prone to such expressions in general.

_Just take the bribes and do what you were going to do anyway,_ sent Torako, who I very firmly ignored.

Kitsu's mannequin smile remained in place. "Perish the thought. I just wanted you to know that my resources are at your disposal, should you require them."

Eh, why not. It wasn't like I had any other leads. I pulled out the picture of Koyama to see if I got a bite.

"Ah yes. Koyama Mari. The member of the Beautification Club so recently attacked."

Wait what.

"That was the matter I was offering my humble assistance with. Since you don't take the trouble to keep up with the news, let me just casually discard this issue that I'm finished with in a manner _nobody_ would take for bribery."

I snatched up the broadsheet before it hit the table. There on the front page of _The Mahora News_ was Koyama's injured face, so clear I wanted to wipe the fresh blood off her. Kamiya would've committed seppeku with a lemon-juice-soaked spoon before letting paparazzi at a patient, so they must have gotten the picture through some new form of guile. "This is why I don't subscribe to the newspaper. When it isn't limited to articles not worth the money, it's doing things I have no intention of financially rewarding."

"Wait a second," interjected Torako. "The school newspaper costs money? I thought clubs for that just gave it out for...free..." She trailed off in the face of Kitsu and me staring blankly at her, for once united in our utter bafflement.

"How...how else are they supposed to make any money?" asked Kitsu, after a moment.

I coughed lightly. "She's had, ah, a rather nonstandard scholastic experience. It seems to have produced some rather odd ideas in her about how normal schools function." I ignored the sputtering from Torako about what was and was not standard or normal, and occasionally about suppositories.

"Anyway," said Kitsu, adopting a sorrowful expression that I swear she was deliberately making as insincere as possible, "I'm deeply wounded that you might think I was involved in this atrocity. I'm a businesswoman, not a butcher. My only concern is the tidy profit my perfectly legitimate establishment turns under the status quo. I shouldn't have to explain this, but when order is threatened, you should look to the malcontents and the unfortunate, with the least to lose and most to gain, not," and she regally placed a hand on her chest, "the most successful people around."

I nodded pensively. "Your only concern is profit, eh? Maybe you should trouble yourself more about, say, your English grades. I happened to see them the last time the scores were posted, and that _shockingly_ low number next to your name just jumped out at me. Oh, how the youth of today has fallen." Her score hadn't, strictly speaking, been as horrendous as I implied, but I certainly wasn't about to let some henna-bedecked pretender think she'd gotten the best of me. Especially given her valid points. Thus, I dropped the money for the meal and the newspaper on the table and swanned off quickly, before she could recover enough to retort.

"So, inspiration hit?" Torako asked once we'd left earshot of the Chao Bao Zi. "You've gone from frustrated to determined for the first time today."

"I didn't realize I was so transparent."

"Fate. I worked under _Fate._ I know a thing or two about reading expressionless faces."

A fair point. "Hopefully she's right, and it's merely some student who feels like an outsider lashing out."

"And not so hopefully?"

"It's...someone more outside than that. A force external to the island, willing to inflict such damage on a middle schooler? I fear for the devastation they could bring."


	11. In Which There is Quite a Lot of Blood

If I was going to find an outsider to the network of alliances and feuds that passed for a club system in this school, I'd need to turn to the Go-Home Club, or the Club That Is Not as Torako more pretentiously named it. It wasn't particularly large, even given the normal social pressures keeping kids in clubs that actually existed. The apathetic drifted towards nominal membership in something or other just for safety's sake, even if they rarely darkened a club room door. Given that, the Go-Home Club was limited to a mercenary toughie here, a die-hard antisocial there...

And Yuuki Yuka, serial cultist.

Yuuki went through obscure fringe religions like Misora went through running shoes. For a few weeks she'd be a devoted follower of Harsihar, a desert god of justice. Then without warning she'd abandon him for an equally fervent devotion to mighty Kraken. After a month of that she'd be a sincere and devout believer in a maiden who undid her human existence to become hope itself. And all without ever seeing anything odd or untoward in her religious inconstancy, which had apparently been one of the few constants about her since elementary school. The Powers That Were shrugged their collective shoulders over it, as she'd thus far avoided any faiths that would require her to violate any school rules, including the decades-old ban on blood sacrifice. Even when she went around proclaiming that the Lord Dragon had broken all bonds and undone all oaths, in practice she generally did as she was told.

Still, her shifting devotion rendered her erratic and just plain _weird_. She might join a club and prove its most dedicated member, only to abandon it along with the deity who had demanded her diligence. If there was anyone in Mahora unbound by the mores and laws of the after-school clubs, it was her. That was the lighter side of my decision to investigate her next. The darker aspect was that if a nefarious agency wished to infiltrate the school for likewise nefarious purposes, she'd be the one to start with. Yuuki lacked even a consistent strangeness from which deviation might be noted. So it was to her domicile, a solitary thing once built by the church to serve as an abbreviated nunnery, that Torako and I wended after our meal.

My first impression was that she'd broken the rule against blood sacrifice.

Well, strictly speaking that's not true. My first impression was _**blood**_. It took my second impression to form a coherent sentence about that observation. My third impression noted Yuuki's body; no not Yuuki's body – Yuuki herself she wasn't a body yet; and the black-cloaked figure slipping out the window. I was already moving after the latter by the time impression number four suggested that that was a worryingly large volume of blood to have come all at once from a lone schoolgirl.

 _Torako!_ I sent. _Use your artif-_

 _Use my artifact to keep the kid from dying until a proper healer, who I am contacting now, can show up,_ she finished. _And teach your granny to hunt, schoolgirl_.

I eschewed further banter entirely because I wanted to focus on my quarry and not at all because advising my Ministra on how to use the artifact she'd had since before I met her was one of my dumber impulses.

My target was swift and agile, and seemed to know the terrain well. Even augmented by magic, it took me a little time before I had a clear stretch to request that the suspect halt. This command was pronounced “Sagitta Magica,” that being the phrasing I had found most effective in these matters.

In this case, I might have had better luck with a more traditional method, as a hardwood pole spinning through the air managed to take out all three arrows. I would have wanted to admire the skill that took if another pole hadn't rammed into my side at nearly the same moment, knocking me to the ground and my staff out of my hand. That sort of thing tends to make one reassess ones priorities.

“Typical mage,” sneered my assailant, a redheaded girl attired in what looked like some Western military dress uniform. Shirogami Hitomi, Fencing Club. “You can command the forces of the universe, but can't take a gah!”

I'd thrown a handful of dirt at her face and a kick at her knee. It seemed the thing to do. That bought me the time to grab my staff and get to my feet, but she recovered quickly. “Did you really think such simple tricks would make me let you hunt them down?” she asked as she launched a lightning-swift series of strikes.

“If they be innocent, let them come and be judged so!” I said, managing to parry the blows. I might have been fighting longer, but this was her specialty and not mine. “Else they but distract the eye of justice from the guilty!”

“The argument of tyrants!” Shirogami returned. Damn everything, a combatant of Ala Alba should not be struggling so against some fifteen-year-old amateur.

“The argument of the rule of law, greatest inoculation against tyrants!” And what was I accomplishing as a fifteen-year-old amateur?

“Tyrants always claim to be backed by the rule of law!” Why, snarky inner commentary, I was accomplishing less than I could nearly eight years later.

“Hardly! Some claim to be freedom fighters, tearing down tyrants like Robespierre!” Was I completely sure about that?

I was spared further argument with the most Chisame-like portions of my brain by Torako contacting me.  _Good news, the girl's alive. I don't think most of the blood was hers, don't ask me where it came from. Also weird is that her room's full of what looks to be maps of Mars. I recognize some of the mountains._

It seemed I'd found my force external.

Combat while bantering is easier to maintain than combat while reeling from a dramatic revelation, and Shirogami took advantage of my lapse to clock me soundly and then send my staff flying from my hands. Fortunately my staff is far from my most dangerous weapon.

“Have you noticed how your bosses need to rely on 'mudborns' to get any fighting done?” I asked. “Not very superior of them.” Hopefully she'd be as choleric as Anya was. A chancy proposition, considering how choleric Anya was before anything else joined her in her skull.

Shirogami blinked. “You wanna mulligan that one? Because I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Huh,” I said, displaying my keen wit and advanced vocabulary. “Does the name 'Ares' mean anything to you?”

“What, like the horoscope?” See, it's an easy mistake.

“No. Not like the horoscope,” I said, keeping commendably calm. “I just got sent a tip that makes them the prime suspect for two assaults on Mahora students. If you stop attacking me now, maybe I can still make sure that there isn't a third.”

She paused for long enough that I very nearly abandoned diplomacy and tried something rash. Then she shrugged and lifted her stick so that it wasn't pointing menacingly at me anymore. “Whoever you were chasing,” she said as I went and retrieved my staff, “they know the system we have for anonymously hiring a little sword work. The dead drops and stuff.”

I didn't respond, being too busy heading off to resume my aborted chase. By this point, though, the trail could have substituted for a freezer. The culprit had been inconsiderate enough not to leave any footprints, out-of-place DNA, or signed notes bragging about their wicked deeds. I suspected Shirogami knew she'd delayed me long enough that letting me go wouldn't matter, and I resolved to share these suspicions with Rina before the child teacher decided how much detention to give her.

Returning to the scene of the crime proved slightly more fruitful, as I there discovered that the bulk of the exciting red liquid festooning the area was prop blood. Yuuki's only injuries were a few shallow cuts and a bruise to the back of the head. As an act of fakery, it was somewhat less impressive than Ares's spiriting away of Arika or Anya, but perhaps it would have been improved without my interruption. It was nice to think that the visit hadn't been an utter waste.

I was entirely unsurprised to hear the next day that the Drama Club wanted my aid in looking over the evidence of a break-in that had left them short a not inconsiderable amount of prop blood. Less expected was the distinctly increased level of tension among the student body, but the reason was soon made clear. Once again, last night's incident adorned the front page of the student newspaper, complete with Yuuki's bloodied picture. Maybe the school should just hire the damn Newspaper Club to do my job.


	12. In Which There Is a Trial by Combat

Torako and I had decided to split up to cover both leads we had at the same time. Since debriefing Yuuki would require my deductive expertise less than investigating the break-in at the prop room, to her bedside Torako went and to the theatre went I.

The break-in was by all appearances a perfectly mundane job. Lock picked, loot purloined, and larcenous person gone without leaving behind any identifiable trace of their presence. In fact, nothing at all at the crime scene was identifiably unusual, at least for a prop room. I took some small comfort in the fact that I could provisionally rule out anyone notably reliant on magic or brute force.

Granted, I could likewise rule out anyone without a motive to steal prop blood, which by my reckoning removed the entire populations of all three worlds from consideration. This did not strike me as satisfactory progress. Oh for thieves who committed their crimes out of cupidity, or spite, or any motive at all comprehensible to an outside party. Hopefully Torako had had better luck on her end.

“Hopefully you've had better luck on your end,” were Torako's first words to me back at my office. Of course they were. “Your medical people didn't find any signs of the tampering, mental or physical, the Cocolova girl had. Our victim wasn't paying any attention when someone snuck in and knocked her out from behind, she doesn't know anything about Ares, Aegis Kai Doru, or the Magic World, and we can't trace the person who got her into her newest cult back to anything because  _there is no contact_. She gets her dogmas from a _website_ , look.”

Torako held up her smartphone, currently viewing the main page of something called “Sectpedia.” I examined it, and for one horrible moment I understood what Chisame feels like constantly.

“This is a wiki. For cults. There is a wiki for cults,” I said.

“'Small-scale religions' is the term your girl prefers. And just gimmee a second to have it on the one she's into now...Here we are. The Truths of Bennett.”

“Discovering and cataloguing knowledge will lead humanity into peace and harmony, it says. I can certainly see the attraction...Wait. This page discusses at length the spiritual importance of mapmaking, how it helps make the world understood by humanity, but there's nothing about Mars. Are you telling me that the Mars maps weren't important because they were of Mars-”

“But because they were maps, yup. This planet's pretty well mapped out, so she figured mapping out the one next door might help. Ares might not be involved at all.”

I remembered my _Meditations_. The cucumber is bitter, throw it out. There are brambles on the path, turn aside. A lead reduces the amount of sense the case makes, pursue another one. A full understanding would reveal that these things were not faults, and screaming incoherently at the heavens over them would be unmeritorious. Letting my face slump to my desk might be permissible, however.

“Maybe she was lying?” I asked, lifting my head up enough to be coherent. “Trying to send us off on a false trail?”

Torako shrugged. “If she was, she's a damn good actor. I've seen a lot of frightened people in my life, and I'd bet anything she was sincerely scared by what happened to her. You could always go back and question her yourself.”

I grunted a declination and resumed slumping.

“I'm picking up subtle cues from your body language that you didn't get anything useful from the prop room break-in,” Torako said after a moment.

I sighed and sat back up. “Just that they can pick a lock, which doesn't reveal much.

“Wait. We _did_ gather valuable information. Every piece of evidence we've been able to obtain points to the culprit possessing more stealth than strength. They're a sneak-thief, an attacker from behind. When I caught them in the act, they ran and enlisted a mercenary to attack me rather than engaging in combat personally. Whoever they are, their talents don't lie in brawn. Even if we don't know what they're trying to accomplish or why, we can use that.”

“Right. They've gone after a pacifist and a loner, so those folks will have found some way to make themselves harder targets by now. Finding a protector or at least traveling in packs, that'd probably be enough against this type. So who's left who'd be vul-” Torako stopped mid-word, staring at me in horrified realization. I suspect I was supposed to arrive at that horrified realization simultaneously so that we could dash off together after we processed it, but since I hadn't matched her logical leap I just made a “go on” gesture.

“How well defended is that lunatic manning the nurse's office? By herself?” she asked. I answered by scrabbling for my battle gear.

“Kamiya's something of a pacifist herself,” I said, grabbing my For Getting Serious potion. “Yes, _and_ a military otaku. Which ensures she won't leave her post if actual bombs start falling. Given how long my investigation at the prop room took, the actual nurse should be leaving right about now. We'd better hurry.”

Hurry we did, though we slowed when we neared the nurse's office so that we wouldn't be seen coming. Peering through a window, I noticed Kamiya still upright. About time something went right in this case.

Torako and I split up to watch opposite sides of the building, while I tried to ignore the nagging suggestion that maybe we'd completely misjudged where our perp would strike next. It was thus an immeasurable relief when Torako triumphantly sent that she'd found a skulker.

My relief decayed back into frustration when I saw who my partner had nabbed. Sunada Reira, bedecked in recording gear and with the heart of a vulture. “Newspaper Club snoop. Bit early to the actionnn...” I slowly raised my hand to touch my own face, ignoring Sunada's struggles and Torako's confused look. The wheels were spinning, the dominoes were toppling, the pieces were falling into place, and above all the metaphors were mixing. “Blood on their faces. In the photos. _Fresh_ blood. Bit early to the action, eh? No _wonder_ you could always get a picture.”

“Any time you're ready to start speaking in actual _sentences_ , Yue?” said Torako, who looked to be running low on patience.

“It's her. She's the perp. And the rest of her club, it's gotta be.”

“Oh really,” said Sunada. She seemed discomfortingly calm about having been nicked. “Let's put that up to the jury, shall we?” She held up her phone, finger pressed firmly to the Send button.

I tensed, ready to react to the...nothing, for a moment. And then the first of them started appearing.

Mahora students. Which would generally not be a surprise on the Mahora campus, but at this hour there shouldn't have been so many out. Nor should so many have been club champions, nor of such grim or wrathful mien, nor all headed straight for me.

“Okay,” said Torako once a goodly number had gathered. “Would anyone like to explain why we are suddenly reenacting Zekado's Children?”

“I have been summoned,” said Kitsu, “and I assume this applies to the others, by a text claiming that I could find proof that our _beloved_ local detective and her lackey were behind the recent attacks if I came here.”

“And here it is!” crowed Sunada, hefting an old-fashioned dictation machine aloft. “I managed to record them talking before they caught me, listen.”

When she hit play, it produced a fairly good imitation of Torako saying, “You're certain this next one will cement our hold on the school?”

“Oh yes,” another voice, which I assumed resembled how I sound to other people, agreed. “They'll flock to our office in terror afte- What's that?” At this point the recording cut off.

“You see?” cried Sunada. “This _outsider_ in our midst has been attacking innocent students to try and create a climate of fear in which she'll thrive, but now she's been found out.” Her smirk may have been the single most punchable expression I've seen off the face of Governor-General Godel.

The crowd was getting ugly, an impressive feat from Mahora's unusually photogenic student body. “Am I not to be allowed a chance to defend myself?” I asked. There was a general subsiding among the mob that I took for assent, but it looked less than inclined to actually listen to anything I had to say. Better surprise it, then. “Let me prove my innocence with the truth of battle!”

Yep, that surprised the assemblage. Even Torako simply dropped her captive, and she should be used to my ways by now. “Are you seriously offering to prove you didn't beat up a couple people by beating up a person in front of us?” asked Kitsu, who seemed to have been designated unofficial mob spokesperson.

“Of course not,” I replied. “I'm proposing to duel a champion of your choosing to help make my case. If after I've presented my defense you still don't believe me, you're free to engage in vigilante justice as normal. All that changes is that one of you gets a chance to attack me before the rest.”

I doubt there were any present who didn't realize there was a trick. There had to be a trick. People didn't say the sort of things that I just had without there being a trick. But what were they supposed to do about it? They couldn't simply deny me what sounded like a reasonable request on the grounds that they were pretty sure that I was doing something unspecified but underhanded. Not and still feel like the good guys. So the assemblage spent some time futilely attempting to discern what I was playing at, and some more time selecting Shirogami as their champion, and yet more time after that girding her in the finest accoutrements they could provide. All the while, I was leaning against the wall, drinking my For Getting Serious potion and preparing to cast a single spell.

At last, they deemed their chosen ready. I felt a sudden burst of school pride as I beheld Shirogami standing there before me. She had talismans to protect her from magic, engineering club gear to keep her safe from electricity, and she'd even let herself be injected with some mysterious glowing fluid, the brave girl. It was almost a shame how badly I was about to trounce her.

“Any last words?” she asked as Kitsu declared battle joined.

“Can you hear me?” I returned.

“Of course.”

“Your mistake,” I said, and slammed my staff into the ground. The spell I cast was technically the thunderclap trick I used to get people's attention. After I'd pumped all the juice my potion and native form could provide into into boosting its power and focusing it where Shirogami was standing, it bore as much resemblance to its normal form as a flamethrower does a lighter. That wasn't a battlefield trick, not unless I found a battlefield where I was going to have plenty of time unmolested to focus my energies on hitting an enemy located at a spot known to me from when I started focusing and without any allies who could take advantage of my mana-depleted state afterwards. Which, what do you know, were just the circumstances that had been provided.

Shirogami's talismans didn't protect her against the perfectly mundane, albeit magically generated, noise. None of her armament did. Anything that could have defended her against that blast of sound greater than the inner ear was meant to withstand would have prevented her from hearing me. Shirogami collapsed to her hands and knees, vomiting from the vertigo. Sonic weaponry may be less lethal than most conventional alternatives, but it's no picnic being on the receiving end.

“Do you yield, or shall I make a second attack?” I asked. Shirogami made a rude hand gesture that I chose to interpret as surrender. “Now then,” I continued to the crowd at large, “I think you will be receptive to my explanation as to why your suspicions of me are misguided. If I felt myself in desperate need of money, I could simply contact Konoe Konoka, Yukihiro Ayaka, or Naba Chizuru. If I wanted to frighten you, I could call in a favor from Ku Fei, Tatsumiya Mana, or Evangeline A. K. McDowell. I take it from the murmuring I do not have to explain who those former classmates and old friends of mine are. Your skills do Mahora proud, but when I am truly motivated I am on an entirely different level. I have no need for petty scheming. This school is not my world, and my aim is far higher than increasing my power here.”

“That sounds...plausible,” said Rei. I hadn't even noticed he-, _him_ join the throng. “My information says she showed no interest in some potentially valuable blackmail material.” Brave boy, considering everyone present would, accurately, assume the dirt was on him.

“Did talk like she had bigger fish to fry,” said Shirogami. “What? I want the bastard taken down whether it's you or not.”

Kitsu sniffed. “She certainly seems to care about test scores for someone _so far_ above us.”

“I care about _your_ test scores because I don't like you,” I said. “You tried to bribe me. That tends to get my full attention.

“If I were really trying to frighten prospective clients into wanting my services, why have the only people attacked been middle schoolers? Money from St. Ursula or the University spends the same. And speaking of money, doesn't it seem like there are more newspapers being bought in these troubled times? The newspaper club is limited to the middle school.”

Sunada shrank from the scrutiny that had just turned on her, her smirk well and truly vanished from her face. “I-I've still got the recording! A smoking gun!”

“I bet you've got a good vocal mimic in the club, too,” I said.

“You can't prove anything!”

“The perp's right,” said Torako, looking as satisfied as, well, a cat. As seen by a mouse in its last moments. “We can't prove anything, as the guilty always say. We'd better head out and leave her here. I'm sure everyone can think of something to do with her.”

I gave Torako a Look. We'd talk later about encouraging mob justice. “We can't let her leave yet. I still need to ask her about the photographs.”

“The photographs?” asked Sunada, with that wondering-where-the-trick-was expression I'd seen so much of recently.

“Oh yes. The photographs of the victims of the attacks. I was wondering when you'd taken them. The subjects had fresh blood on them, and I couldn't work out why. They were cleaned up when they were brought to the infirmary, and the only people who would have seen them bloodied before then were the people who found them. And the attacker, of course. Funny thing is, I don't recall either of them being found by anyone from the Newspaper Club.”

Sunada had turned an absolutely fascinating shade of grey during my musings. “I think I would like to talk to a teacher now.”

“I'll go ahead and call one up. And I'm sure they won't have to deal with a large collection of curfew violations, _will they?_ ” At those magic words the multitude dispersed, while I called someone up to let them know I'd finally made sense of the whole tangled mess. Once Sunada had been collected and officially designated Not My Problem, Kamiya sidled up to me with a mien that reminded me strongly of Nodoka at around her age.

“You said you know Tatsumiya Mana? _The_ Tatsumiya Mana?” she asked.

“There's only one, to the best of my knowledge.”

“Do you...would she...” she said, her face looking like eggs would fry on it.

I took pity. “I'll see if I can put you in contact with her. In exchange, I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention to anyone that I'm about to go in the infirmary and collapse from exhaustion.” Kamiya's a quick kid, and had me to a bed before I gave an involuntary demonstration of what I meant.

Perhaps I'd overdone it in the duel. Just a little bit.

I've started to feel a disquieting amount of satisfaction on waking up in a hospital bed with the twinges of recent healing or the headache of mana exhaustion. It's a Pavlovian reaction to the way such awakenings tend to correlate with a job well done. Surely there must be a way to accomplish my objectives without collapsing afterwards. Maybe I need to consider a quieter line of work.

“You ever think you need to consider a quieter line of work?” asked Torako as my eyes opened.

“I'm afraid I've been unable to find any terrorist organizations currently taking applications.”

“You joke, but I didn't have to spend all this time convalescing when I worked with Master Fate.”

“I didn't convalesce when you worked with Fate either. It was a different time. At least if the established pattern holds we can expect simple, easy tasks for the near future.” It looked like Torako wanted to respond to that, but I had words that needed saying, the sooner the better. “I'm aware of your rather loose acquaintanceship with the rule of law, but advocating mob justice, Torako?”

She gave me a good look at her gritted teeth as she spat out, “Better mob justice than no justice! It's great when rules and justice go together, but you know, I don't remember any of your team turning themselves in when you were wanted criminals back on my world. You know why that kid and her club were attacking people? Because the big, scary news story _sold more papers_. They were beating up civilians so more kids would plunk down their allowances! I don't _care_ what makes scum like that pay!”

“Well I do! I was _hired_ to care!” I said, wrenching myself upright. “There are times and places where your ears or my spells would have marked us abominations for the mob to expunge. What makes what you tried to do better than that?”

“Because I'm _right_ \- Yue!”

The sudden interjection must have been triggered by my equally sudden attack of vertigo being apparent to any cat-eared observers that might be present. Mana exhaustion can make a hangover seem relaxing, and provides less excuse to drink. Anger gone as swiftly as it had appeared, Torako gently laid me back down as I tried for a reassuring smile. Silence reigned for a moment as I waited for the ceiling to return to its customary stationary arrangement.

“So,” said Torako. “You were saying that you think we won't have any excitement for a while?”

“I assume from your bringing it up that I am in error.”

“I went and looked through your mail, because _someone_ has to, and I found something you'll want to see. That tends to happen when someone checks their mail, you know.” Torako tossed an opened envelop at me. I began perusing the contents, feeling the tempo of the pounding in my head increase as she continued. “But hey, you might have been right the first time. Maybe nobody will be fool enough to attack the wedding of Springfield and Helladias.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Book Three


	13. In Which There is a Security Detail

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Book Four: The Case of the Majestic Marriage

The Royal Wedding, as the Important Capital Letters suggested, was clearly going to be the sort of event that passed into legend by its first anniversary. Anybody who was anybody would be in attendance, and those who did not fit that tautology would be jealous of those who did. Negi's union with Theodora Basileia Helladis de Vesperisszimia – whose full name I had taken the trouble to memorize beforehand, just in case – was a weighty political statement as well as the wedding of two beloved celebrities. Bored students might be required to memorize this date one day, and here I was a close and longstanding friend of the groom.

Naturally, I was working security.

My disengagement from the festivities was Chisame's fault. By her authority as some manner of advisor to Negi, she'd entrusted me with keeping, quote, “the horribleness down a dull roar. I'm not asking for everything to go perfectly, because weddings are bad enough without magical world crap or that idiot getting involved, but I can at least trust you not to make things worse. You have no idea how rare that is,” unquote. I suspected that being required to interact with other people face to scowling face had left her less gruntled than usual.

Of course, I wasn't expected to do this alone, or with just Torako to help. Hellas had its own crack security team, as befit royalty. Chisame just had trouble with the concept of trusting someone she hadn't personally vetted to be able to do their jobs. For my part, I saw no reason to doubt that the tall, scar-faced Hellas man introduced to me as Lenaris, chief of security, was anything less than the stern professional he appeared.

“So you're the one from Negi's Girls,” he said by way of greeting. Well, I've been wrong before.

I favored him with a smile that would make a polar bear shiver. “And you're one of Theo's Boys.”

His only retort was a grunt, whether because bickering was beneath him or witty repartee beyond him I couldn't say. “I've been informed you're here to supplement the security team. My team doesn't actually need any supplementing, but I hope I can at least trust you not to make things any worse.”

My smile lost a few Kelvins. “As it happens, I was selected for ability in that very area.”

“...Great. Just stay out of the way of anyone in a grey coat like this and we'll be fine.” From his general demeanor I gathered this should be taken as a dismissal.

Well, this Lenaris fellow might consider me less than indispensable, but I dared say I had an eye for trouble that would have slipped right under his upraised nose.

“Hello Fuuka. Hello Fumika,” I said, clapping a hand on the shoulder of each half of the first trouble I'd sussed out. “With what exciting manner of chaos do you propose to enliven the proceedings today?”

“What are you talking about?” asked Fuuka, as innocent as a babe trying too hard to hide its guilt. “We weren't going to do anything like that, were we Fumika?”

“Our long years in schooling together provides me with quite the store of stories about your youth,” I noted idly. “Some of which might be considered rather embarrassing. I wonder if any of these very important people that I, unlike you, will probably never see again might concur with that assessment.”

Fuuka sounded like she was in the middle of doubling down on their utter blamelessness when Fumika, the twin with a firm grasp of the concept of actions having consequences, sighed and fished out a stoppered bottle to drop in my waiting palm. “Trust us. These state weddings are very long and very, very boring. We'd have been doing everyone a favor.”

“And what exactly is this?” I asked, peering suspiciously at the bottle and running through the long list of liquids that could make an event less boring.

Fuuka huffed. “Love potion to spike the drinks with, okay? The fall-in-love-with-the-next-person-you-see kind. It would have been funny and you know it.”

Torako made a noise like she'd gone cat enough to cough up a hairball. “What is _wrong_ with you people? These are illegal for a reason!”

“It's not the _creepy_ kind!” said Fumika.

“We wouldn't use the _creepy_ kind!” said Fuuka.

“It's that kind that also mellows you out so you won't do worse than hug kinda hard and recite bad poetry.”

“And is actually legal in some places because of that.”

“Including where we bought it.”

“So we haven't done anything wrong and want our stuff back.”

“As an alternative,” I said, “you can give me your backup as well and I'll leave you be without listing all the ways I can think that dosing random guests with it at a meeting of nations could go appallingly wrong.”

Fuuka rolled her eyes even as she acquiesced. “Look, we're the ones who've been up to our necks in geopolitics since before graduation, okay? Nobody is going to start a war no matter what happens here, nobody is going to get blamed for what a love potion has them do, and nobody would have fallen asleep halfway through the ceremony this time. All we had to do was not get caught.”

“I've heard _that_ before,” murmured Fumika.

“Hush. Know this, Ayase Yue. I'm not even going to bother getting you back, because when the boredom comes and you know, heart and soul, that it's your fault for interfering with some harmless fun, that will be punishment enough. Are we done here?”

I smiled the smile of one who has brought a book for the dull bits and waved them off.

Having exhausted the “go bother my former classmates” method of chaos prevention – since Haruna was elsewhere lest she be arrested again and Misora had her own people to keep her leashed – I fell back on the old standby of “wander around aimlessly and keep an eye out.” It's a method I have quite a lot of practice with, which probably explains why it soon paid off.

It was an apparently unassuming tile on an inconspicuous bit of wall that tripped the instincts I'd honed over long years of sorting through chicanery. I poked it and was gratified to find my finger going right through it. The old illusionary surface trick. A classic.

When I dispelled the illusion I found myself looking at, well, a contraption was about as much as I could figure out. Judging from the hiss of indrawn breath from Torako, _she_ knew what it was.

“I know what that is,” she said. See? “Adeat,” she added, throwing up a bubble of slow time around it. “It's a bomb, one that'll throw out a cloud of something awful when it goes off. Find the security asshole, he can probably get you a specialist to disarm it.”

The reaction to my going to do just that was somewhat less grave than I anticipated. “Found one, did you?” he said, in a tone indicating that perhaps I wasn't _entirely_ useless after all. Relax, they're harmless. Come on, I'll show you.”

So we returned to where Torako was keeping the apparently harmless device contained. Lenaris waved her to the side and took out a knife. “See, when we started spotting these we had one of ours go over them with a spell to see what the payload was. Turned out to be nothing but aluminum.” He paused. I suspect that one of us was supposed to parrot back, “Aluminum?” but that seemed like a rather inane response and I still didn't like him very much so I just waved for him to continue. He snorted a bit and sliced out a section of the bomb, letting silvery dust spill out. “Looks like someone was trying to make a glitter shower. We get a lot of that sort of thing, people trying to liven up these long ceremonies.”

“Dosing the refreshments with love potion, and such,” I said.

“Exactly. Surprised we haven't had to swap out the drinks yet. Anyway, we've gone through and disabled all the bombs, but removing them before the ceremony might cause a stir. Despite whoever's best efforts, we're going to keep things nice and boring.”

“A perspective I'm unused to,” I said. “Traditionally I've worked with colleagues dedicated to the maximization of chaos and excitement. Colleagues who would often prepare a backup in case their first effort was thwarted. I'm going to investigate more thoroughly to identify any hidden surprises.” I stepped forward and began rummaging through the payload as I finished speaking.

Lenaris shrugged. “Suit yourself, but you aren't going to find anythi-”

“I've found something. There's some sort of spike with a scoop around it, and a spring behind it. All made of aluminum, I presume. It looks like when it gets triggered, it'll cut a hole in the bomb and then push the aluminum dust out. Not possibly with enough force to propel the dust an appreciable distance, though. So why?”

Lenaris harrumphed and touched a finger to his temple for a moment. “Damned if I know, but I can tell you that if my lot found a bunch of bags of aluminum dust just lying around somewhere for no clear reason, we'd get them out pronto and work out what they were for later. Don't see any reason to change that policy now, so I've sent a message out,” he said, already grabbing handfuls of the stuff and secreting them in inside pockets.

Maybe there was a mole in the greycoats. Maybe the sudden hustle from the security team showed the jig was up. Maybe it was simply unhappy chance. Whatever the reason, before the aluminum dust could be packed away the scoops went off, shoving the dust out into the open where a mighty wind picked it up and tossed it into the air to fill the hall. Now, this was a vast space, worthy of the momentous occasion scheduled to take place. Anyone with the control and power to pull off a wind spell to disseminate all that dust throughout it had me very concerned.

“Thtay calm, worthieth,” proclaimed a voice from near the entrance. Its source was dressed in something crisply militaristic and resembled Quasimodo after back surgery. The misshapen face that had evidently been assembled by a shaky-handed drunk didn't seem to inconvenience him much, judging from the palpable smugness of his demeanor. A globe of windborn dust swirled above his outstretched hand. “If thparkth fly with all thith dutht in the air, the reacthion could be, ah,” he twitched a finger and a tiny bolt of lightning lanced towards the globe of dust, which exploded on contact.

I swore I could _smell_ the fear in the room as the gathered dignitaries processed the fact that we were standing in the world's largest and grandest bomb.

The stranger's smile grew even smugger as he finished, quite unnecessarily, “ _eckthplothive_.''


End file.
